*%r
ARMENIAN ATROCITIES
THE MURDER OF A NATION
fc* _
ARNOLDT^J. TOYNBEE
Of /,* <r ,,. - V-
4 t
WITH A SPRHCh ORUVRkHB BY
■i lordbryce'' r>
IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS
ifornia
)nal
ity
HODDHR & STOUQHTON,
London. New York. Toronto.
MCMXV.
WAYNE S. VUCINICM
GEISa LIBRARY Q -
.•-'. ..-_* i' :« c.&
A MAP
displaying*
THE SCENE OF THE ATROCITIE&
Evtry place mar this map, villi the exception
deportations, or m or both, between April and N
The nine places underlined were the destinations mat
■>• for death.
* Dhitnotika, Malgara, and Keshan, ia Thrace, are too far
tided in square brackets, has been the scene of either
*&* . . .
"such of the deported Armenians as reached them, as waiting'
appear oa this map, but they must be added to the list.
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
PAG8.
5
Statement by Lord Bryce
I.— Armenia before the Massacres ... 17
II.— The Plan op the Massacres ...
HI.— The Road to Death
IV.— The Journey's End
V.— False Excuses
VI.— Murder Outright
YIL— The Toll of Death
VIII. The Attitude of Germany
26
39
56
69
83
93
106
THE ARMENIAN MASSACRES.
By LORD BRYCE.*
As His Majesty's Government have, of course,
been unable to obtain, except from one or two
quarters, such as the Consul at Tiflis quoted by
Lord Cromer, any official information with regard
to what has been passing in Armenia and Asiatic-
Turkey, I think it right to make public some
further information which has reached me from
various sources — sources which I can trust,
though for obvious reasons I cannot, by men-
tioning them here, expose my informants to
danger. The accounts come from different quarters,
but they agree in essentials, and in fact confirm
one another. The time is past when any
harm can be done by publicity ; and the fuller
publicity that is given to the events that have
happened the better it will be, because herein lies
* The version here printed embodies Lord Bryce's owr
revision and enlargement of the official report of hit
epeech delivered in the House of Lords on October 6tb
1915.
the only possible chance that exists of arresting
tlies" massacres, if they have not yet been com*
pleted.
I am grieved to say that such information Us has
reached mc from several quarters goes to show that
the number of those who have perished in the
various ways to which I shall refer is very targe.
It lias been estimated at the figure of 800,000.
Though hoping that figure to be tar beyond the
mark, \ cannot venture to pronounce it incredible,
for there has beeu an unparalleled destruction of
life all over the country from the frontiers of Persia
to the Sea of Marmora, only a very few of the cities
on the Aegean Coast having so far escaped. This
is so, because the proceedings taken have been so
carefully premeditated and systo maticaUy carried
out with a ruthless efficiency previously unknown
among the Turks. The massacres are the result of
a policy which, as far as cau 1 taint !. has
n entertained for some considerable time by the
gang of unscrupulous adventurers who arc now
in possession of the Government of the Turkish
Kmpire. Tin-' ted to pul ir in practice until
they thought the favourable moment had come, and
that moment seems to have arrived ab >ut the month
of April. That was the time when the-*.* orders
were issued, orders which cam.' down in every case
from Constantinople, and which the officials found
7
themselves obliged to carry out on pain of
dismissal.
There was no Moslem passion against the Ar-
menian Christians. All was done by the will of
the Government, and done not from any religious
fanaticism, but simply because they wished, for
reasons purely political, to get rid of a non-Moslem
element which impaired the homogeneity of the
Empire, and constituted an element that might not
always submit to oppression. All that I have
learned confirms what has already been said else-
where, that there is no reason to believe that in
this case Musulman fanaticism came into play at
all. So far as can be made ont, though of course
the baser natures have welcomed and used the
opportunities for plunder which slaughter and
deportations afford, these massacres have been
viewed by the better sort of religions Moslems
with horror rather than with sympathy. It would
be too much to say that they have often attempted
to interfere, but at any rate they do hot seem to
have shown approval of the conduct of the Turkish
Government.
There is nothing in the precepts of Islam which
justifies the slaughter which has been perpetrated. I
am told on good authority that high Moslem religious
authorities condemned the massacres ordered by
Abdul Hamid, and these are far more atrocious.
In some cases the Governors, being pious and
humane men, refused to execute the orders that
had reached them, and endeavoured to give what
protection they could to the unfortunate Armenians.
In two cases I have heard of the Governors being
immediately dismissed for refusing to obey the
orders. Others more pliant were substituted, and
the massacres were carried out.
As I have said, the procedure was exceedingly
systematic. The whole Armenian population of
each town or village was cleared out, by a house-to-
house search. Every inmate was driven into the
street. Some of the men were thrown into prison,
where they were put to death, sometimes with
torture ; the rest of the men, with the women and
children, were marched out of the town. When
they had got some little distance they were
separated, the men being taken to some place
among the hills where the soldiers, or the Kurdish
tribes who were called in to help in the work
of slaughter, despatched them by shooting or
bayonetting. The women and children and old
men were sent off under convoy of the lowest
kind of soldiers — many of them just drawn from
gaols — to their distant destination, which was
sometimes one of the unhealthy districts in the
centre of Asia Minor, but more frequently the large
desert in the province of Der el Zor, which lies east of
Aleppo, iii the direction of the Euphrates. They were
driven along by the soldiers day after day. ;ill on
loot, beaten or left behind to perish if they could
not keep up with the caravan : many fell by the
way, and many died of hunger. No provisions
were given them by the Turkish Government, and
they had already been robbed of everything thej
possessed. Not a i'rw of the women were stripped
naked and made to travel in that condition beneath
aborning sun. Some of the mothers went mad
and threw away their children, being unable to
carry them Further. The caravan route was
marked by a line of corpses, and comparatively
few seem to have arrived at the destinations
Avhich had been prescribed for them — chosen, no
doubt, because return was impossible and because
there was little prospect that any would survive
their hardships. E have had circumstantial
accounts of; these, deportations which bear internal
evidence of being veracious, and I was told by
an American friend who lias lately returned
from Constantinople that he had heard accounts
at Constantinople, confirming fully those which
had come to me, and that what had struck
him was the comparative calmness with which
these atrocities were detailed by those who had
first-hand knowledge of them. Tilings which we
find scarcely credible excite little surprise in
Turkey. Massacre was the ov<h>v of the day
10
in Eastern Ruinelia in 1876, and, in 1895-6, in
Asiatic Turkey.
When the Armenian population was driven from
its homes, many of the women were not killed, but
reserved for a more humiliating fate. They were
mostly seized by Turkish officers or civilian
officials, and consigned to their harems. Others
were sold in the market, but only to a Moslem
purchaser, for they were to be made Moslems by
force. Never again would they see parents or
husbands — these Christian women condemned at one
stroke to slavery, shame and apostasy. The boys
and girls were also very largely sold into slavery,
at prices sometimes of only ten to twelve shillings,
while other boys of tender age were delivered to
dervishes, to be carried off to a sort of dervish
monastery, and there forced to become Musulmans.
To oive one instance of the thorough and
remorseless way in which the massacres were carried
out, it may suffice to refer to the case of Trebizond,
a case vouched for by the Italian Consul who was
present when the slaughter was carried out, his
country not having then declared war against
Turkey. Orders came from Constantinople that
all the Armenian Christians in Trebizond were to
be killed. Many of the Moslems tried to save their
Christian neighbours, and offered them shelter in
their houses, but the Turkish authorities were
11
implacable. Obeying the orders which they had
received, they hunted out all the Christians,
gathered them together, and drove a great crowd
of them down the streets of Trebizond, past the
fortress, to the edge of the sea. There they were
all put on board sailing boats, carried out some
distance on the Black Sea, and there thrown over-
board and drowned. Nearly the whole Armenian
population of from 8,000 to 10,000 were destroyed —
some in this way, some by slaughter, some by
being sent to death elsewhere. After that, any
other story becomes credible ; and I am sorry to
say that all the stories that I have received con-
tain similar elements of horror, intensified in some
cases by stories of shocking torture. But the most
pitiable case is not that of those whose misery was
ended by swift death, but of those unfortunate
women who, after their husbands had been killed
and their daughters violated, were driven out with
their young children to perish in the desert — where
they have no sustenance, and where they are the
victims of the wild Arab tribes around them. It
would seem that three-fourths or four-fifths of the
whole nation has been wiped out, and there is no
case in history, certainly not since the time of
Tamerlane, in which any crime so hideous and
upon so large a scale has been recorded.
Let me add, because this is of some importance in
12
viuw of the excuses which, as we understand, the
German Government are putting forward, and which
their Ambassador in Washington is stated to have
given, when he talked about " the suppression of
riots/' for the conduct of those who are their allies,
that there is no ground for the suggestion that
there had been any rising on the part of the
Armenians. A certain number of Armenian volun-
teers have fought on the side of the Russians in
the Caucasian Army, but they came, as I have
been informed, from the Armenian population
of Trans- Caucasia. It may be that some few
Armenians crossed the frontier in order to tight
alongide their Armenian brethren in Trans -Caucasia
for Russia, but at any rate, the volunteer corps
which rendered such brilliant service to the
Russian Army in the first part of the war was
composed of Russian Armenians living in the
Caucasus. Wherever the Armenians, almost wholly
unarmed as they were, have fought, they have
fought in self-defence to defend their families and
themselves from the cruelty of the ruffians who
constitute what is called the Government of the
country. There is no excuse whatever upon any
such ground as some German authorities and
newspapers allege, for the conduct of the Turkish
Government. Their policy of slaughter and depor-
tation has been wanton and unprovoked. It
13
appears to be simply an application of the maxim
once enunciated by Sultan Abdul Hamid : " The
way to get rid of the Armenian question is to
get rid of the Armenians " ; and the policy of
extermination has been carried out with far more
thoroughness and with far more bloodthirsty
completeness by the present heads of the Turkish
Administration — they describe themselves as the
Committee of Union and Progress — than it was in
the time of Abdul Hamid.
There are still, I believe, a few places in which
the Armenians, driven into the mountains, are
defending themselves as best they can. About
5,000 were taken off lately by French cruisers on
the coast of Syria, and have now been conveyed to
Egypt, and they tell us that in the heights of
Sassoon and in Northern Syria, possibly also in
the mountains of Cilicia, there are still a few bands,
with very limited provision of arms and munitions,
valiantly defending themselves as best they can
against their enemies. The whole nation, therefore,
is not yet extinct, so far as regards these refugees
in the mountains, and those who have escaped into
Trans- Caucasia ; and I am sure we are all heartily
agreed that every effort should be made that can
be made to send help to the unfortunate survivors,
hundreds of whom are daily perishing by want and
14
disease. It is all that we in England can now do;
let us do it, and do it quickly.
I have not so far been able to obtain any
authentic information regarding the part said to
have been taken by German officials in directing or
encouraging these massacres, and therefore it would
not be right to express any opinion on the subject.
But it is perfectly clear that the only chance of
saving the unfortunate remnants of this ancient
Christian nation is to be found in an expression
of the public opinion of the world, especially that
of neutral nations, which may possibly exert some
influence even upon the German Government and
induce them to take the only step by which the
massacres can be arrested. They have hitherto
stood by with callous equanimity. Let them now
tell the Turkish Government that they are prepar-
ing for themselves a well-earned retribution, and
that there are some things which the outraged
opinion of the world will not tolerate.
BRYCE.
15
THE EVIDENCE.
Tin '/following statement is based upon uuimpeaeh-
able testimonies. There are the narratives of
missionaries — Germans as well as Swiss, Americans
and other citizens of neutral countries. There are
reports from consuls on the spot, including, again,
the representatives of the German Empire. There
are numerous private letters and letters published in
the Allied and the neutral press, which record the
evidence of eye-witnesses as to what they have seen.
And there are the scries of personal depositions
which have already been published by a Com-
mittee of distinguished citizens of the United States,
The nmre closely these, independent pier <s 0f evidence
are examined, the more precisely they prove to bear
cue another out, sometimes even in the minutest di tails.
The facts contained in them are here presented with
full assurance of their truth. It is of course im-
possible to name such sources of evidence as have not
yet been named in print, because this would expose
to imminent danger such of them as are within the
Tu ) 7t' ish dominions.
17
I. ARMENIA BEFORE THE
MASSACRES.
The German War began by working horror
and desolation in unaccustomed places — peaceful
Belgium and the industrial heart of France.
Latterly it has also succeeded in aggravating the
wounds of countries already stricken sore. Poland
has learnt to envy her condition before August,
1914 ; the Balkan peoples have been robbed of their
last hope of fraternity ; and now, on the Eastern
fringe of Germany's arena, the intermittent sufferings
of the Armenian race have culminated in an
organised, cold-blooded attempt on the part of
its Turkish rulers to exterminate it once and for
all by methods of inconceivable barbarity and
wickedness.
The Armenians are perhaps the oldest established
of the civilised races in Western Asia, and they
are certainly the most vigorous at the present day
Their home is the tangle of high mountains be-
tween the Caspian, the Mediterranean, and the
Black Seas. Here the Armenian peasant has lived
18
from time immemorial the hardworking life he was
leading till the eve of this ultimate catastrophe.
Here a strong, civilised Armenian kingdom was the
first state in the world to adopt Christianity as its
national religion. Here Church and people have
maintained their tradition with extraordinary
vitality against wave upon wave of alien conquest
from every quarter.
For many centuries past, however, Armenia has
not been co-extensive with the Armenian race ; for
in the Eastern provinces of the Turkish Empire
we find the same phenomenon of racial inter-
mixture and disintegration as has been produced in
the Balkans by the operation of the Turkish regime.
Under the malignant administration of the Moslem
conqueror, the Kurds, also an ancient race, but one
which has remained uncivilised, have spread out
from their old seats over the Armenian's ancestral
mountains. They prefer a wilderness for the
pasturage of their sheep and goats, and look
askance at the neat villages and well - tilled
fields of the original inhabitants of the land.
Thus the Armenian has lost the undivided posses-
sion of his proper country ; but he has recompensed
himself by finding many new homes beyond its
borders. For the Armenian is not only an indus-
trious peasant, he has a talent for handicraft and
intellectual pursuit?. The most harassed village in
19
the mountains would never despair of its village
school, and these schools were avenues to a wider
world. He has also that talent for commerce
which the Jew displays in Eastern Europe and
the Greek in the Levant, and he plays a similar
role himself, as the skilled workman and the man
of business, in the interior of Asiatic Turkey. Every
town in Northern Syria and Anatolia had, eight
months ago, its populous, prosperous Armenian
quarter — the focus of local skill, intelligence and
trade, as well as of the town's commercial relations
with Constantinople and Europe. At Constanti-
nople itself, the Armenian population had risen to
more than 200,000, and there were nearly as many
in Tiflis, the capital of Russian Trans-Caucasia.
Trans-Caucasia, in fact, with its orderly Christian
government and its promising economic develop-
ment, had become a second home of the Armenian
race. The Katholikos, or head of the Armenian
Church, resides in Russian territory, at Etchmiad-
zin, and there were perhaps 750,000 Armenians on
the northern side of the Russo-Turkish frontier.
Eight months ago, however, these represented a
minority of the race, for about 1,200,000 still
remained under Turkish rule. Rather more than
half this majority was to be found in the original
Armenia, east of the upper Euphrates and north
of the Tigris. The rest were scattered through all
20
the towns between the Euphrates and Constanti-
nople. Their numbers were especially strong in
the Adana district of Cilicia, a rich plain bordering
on the north-east corner of the Mediterranean, while
in the mountain fastnesses above the plain the hill
towns of Zeitoun and Hadjin were flourishing
centres of Armenian life.
The condition of these twelve hundred thousand
people — about <S per cent, of the total population of
the Turkish Empire — had always been unenviable.
They were treated as a subject race, and lacked the
right of bearing arms, a status which, in a lawless
country, left them peculiarly at the mercy of their
individual Moslem neighbours. But there were
advantages to write off against such drawbacks.
Among a rather stupid, conservatively inclined
Turkish population, their commercial genius gave
them a virtual monopoly of trade, and a corre-
spondingly large share in the wealth of the country.
Hard-earned gains might often in individual cases
be reft away by local tyranny ; but the Armenian's
gifts were really indispensable to his meters, and
their general recognition of this fact was shown by
the general toleration he received from them. In
fact, the subject, Christian, intellectual Armenian
and the dominant, Moslem, agrarian Turk had
settled down into an effective, if rough and
ready, equilibrium.
21
This old-established adjustment of the Armenian
problem was first assailed by Sultan Abd-ul-
Hamid. His Balkan experience had taught him
the policy of keeping the races of his Empire in
hand by setting" them to massacre one another.
Applying it to his Eastern provinces, where he
feared that the intelligent and 'active Christian
population might seek liberty as the Bulgars had
sought it and obtained it at Russia's hands in
1878, he redoubled exactions, introduced new
oppressions, and ended by enlisting the services of
the Kurdish tribesmen as " Hamidieh Cavalry."
Official badges and modern rifles were served
out to the Kurds in their new capacity, and
they were initiated into their welcome duty.
The results were the unprecedented Armenian
massacres under official direction, that horrified
the civilized world in 1895 and 1896, and
evoked from Gladstone the last public speech
of his old age. When Abd-ul-Hamid was over-
thrown in 1908 and the " Committee of Union and
Progress " proclaimed constitutional government
and equal civil rights for all Ottoman citizens,
there seemed hope of better things ; but the
Ottoman Constitution was followed in less than a
year by the equally atrocious though less wide-
spread massacres of Adana. Even that paroxysm
passed, but it left a chronic evil behind. Mr. Noel
Buxton, who travelled in Turkish Armenia a few
months before the outbreak of the present war,
reported that the Young Turks had recklessly
followed the Hamidian policy of arming the Kurds,
and that a fresh disaster was possible at any
moment. Then came the war. Turkey entered it
on the German side, and the crimes began which
will be narrated in the following pages.
The evidence on which the following account is
based is drawn from various quarters. Some of it
has appeared already in print. A smaller part
has been sent privately to Lord Bryce, who has
many personal links with the Armenian people.
It agrees completely with other material incor-
porated in the Report (published in full in
the United States on October 4th. 1915) of
the American Committee of Inquiry — a body
of twenty-five members, including two ex-
ambassadors to the Porte, and f'>\\\' directors
of American mission - work in the Ottoman
Empire, as well as persons of such individual
eminence as Cardinal Gibbons, Bishops Greer
and Rhinelander, Dr. Charles W. Eliot (Ex-
President of Harvard University), Mr. Charles
R. Crane, Mr. Stephen S. Wise and Mr. John R.
33
Motfe.* The evidence is indeed abundant and
direct, and it is also appalling in the uniformity
with which it unfolds its otherwise scarcely
credible tale. Part of it is from the mouth of
neutral witnesses — European or American travellers
and men of business who have returned from the
interior of Turkey since the horrible work began,
or permanent residents sufficiently protected by
their status to be able to communicate what they
have seen on the >pot. Testimony of this
unequivocal character tonus the backbone of the
American Committee's statement ; but even in
these eases the evidence has to be presented, from
•American Committee ox Armenian Atrocities.
70, Fifth Avenue, New York,
James L. Barton,! Samuel T. Duttox,
Chairman. Secretary
Charles R. Crane,
Treasurer.
Cleveland H. Dodge, Frank Mason North.
Charles W. Eliot. Harry V. Osborn.
James Cardinal Gibbons. Rt. Rev. P. Rhinelander.
Rt. Rev. David II. Greer. Karl Davis Robinson.
Norman Hapgood. William W. Rockwell.
William 1. Haven. Isaac N. Seligman.
Maurice H. Harris. William Sloane.
Arthur Curtis James. Edward Lincoln Smith.
Frederick Lynch. Oscar S. Strans.
H. Pereira Mend is. Stanley White.
John R. jfclott Stephen S. V,
j Secretary of the American Mission? Board.
24
motives of precaution, in an anonymous form, and
in dealing with testimony from native Armenian
sources the necessity for the strictest reticence i3
even more apparent. The crime has been com-
mitted without pretext, but no excuse for continuing
it in the cases of individuals who had exposed its
horrors, would come amiss to its authors and
organisers. Nevertheless, the witness of the
Armenians to their own sufferings is as clear as
the evidence of their better protected friends.
It is headed by the statement of the Katholikos
himself, transmitted from Russia to the Armenian
National Defence Union in the U.S., and pub-
lished on September 27th in the American press;
and his words are borne out by a confidential
letter which another high Armenian ecclesiastic,
resident in this case in neutral territory, has
received from a prominent fellow - countryman
in the striken area. And then there are the
refugees — the remnant of the nation that has
found safety behind the Russian lines in the
Caucasus, or made its way to Egypt across the
friendly Mediterranean. For instance, there were
the 4,200 Armenians — men, women and children —
from Selefkeh, the port of Antioch, whom the
French cruiser squadron landed safely at Port Said at
the end of September. They had been seven weeks
in the hills, fighting for life with antiquated guns
and scanty ammunition, and with their backsto the
sea. Against Turkish regulars reinforced by all
the blackguards of the Aleppo slums, their chance
seemed desperate ; but they knew it was the only
chance they had, for the order had come to prepare
within a week for deportation, and the fate of all
their deported kinsmen from Anatolia was before
their eyes. But this is to anticipate the sequence
of the narrative. The evidence in hand has been
sufficiently indicated, and it will be better to set
forth the whole series of crimes from their
beginning.
26
II THE PLAN OF THE MASSACBES.
The entrance of Turkey into the War last
Autumn did not immediately aggravate the
Armenians' lot. Young Turk policy had extended
the burden of military service to the Christian as
well as the Moslem population ; but that might be
regarded in the light of a privilege, as a recognition
of the equality of all Ottoman citizens before the law.
Moreover, many Armenians had paid commutation
in lieu of enrolment. It has been said, and cannot
be emphasised too strongly, that the race was
industrious, prosperous, devoted to the works of
peace. It included a large proportion of highly
educated men and not a few educated women, who
had been taught in the schools and universities of
Europe, or in the excellent colleges of the American
missions ; and it supplied Turkey with that class
of thinkers and contrivers, teachers, traders and
artificers, which gives a country its brain.* The
war, again, was directed against Christian powers,
and undertaken by those who had massacred their
brethren at Adana only live years before. For the
* In Russia many Armenians have achieved distinction
in war as well, for eyaniple Prince Bagration, Napoleon's
opponent in 1812, and Generals Mel'ikoH" and Lazareil in
the Russo-Turkish War of 18/7-8.
27
Armenians it was not a war of patriotism ; so
many Armenian men remained quietly at home,
and when those who were drafted were deprived
of their arms by order of the Government, and
brigaded into labour battalions to work on the
roads, it is improbable that they resented the
change of duty. Thus the winter passed with
little foreboding of the coming spring.
But meanwhile the Government at Constan-
tinople— if Government is not too good a name for
Enver, Talaat, and the rest of that " Committee of
Union and Progress" which Lord Brycehas justly
described as a " gang of unscrupulous ruffians," —
meanwhile, this unprincipled and all - powerful
organisation was working out its plans, and it
began to put them into action in April.
The scheme was nothing less than the exter-
mination of the whole Christian population within
the Ottoman frontiers. For the war had tem-
porarily released the Ottoman Government from
the control, slight as it was, which the Concert
of Europe had been able to exert. The belligerents
on one side were Turkey's allies and very good
friends ; and Enver, looking to the future, relied
upon their promised victory to shield himself and
his accomplices from the vengeance of the Western
powers and Russia, which had always stood
between the malignant hostility of the Ottoman
28
Government and the helplessness of its Christian
subjects. The denunciation of the " Capitula-
tions" broke down the legal barrier of foreign pro-
tection, behind which many Ottoman Christians had
fennel more or less effective shelter. Nothing re-
mained but to use the opportunity and strike a
stroke that would never need repetition. " After
this," said Talaat Bey, when he gave the final
signal, " there will be no Armenian question for
fi ffcy years."
The crime was concerted very systematically, for
there is evidence of identical procedure from over
fifty places. They are too numerous to be detailed
here, but every one of them" is shewn on the
accompanying map, and they will be found to
include every important town in Armenia proper
and in Eastern Anatolia, as well as Ismid and
Bre-nssa in the west, not to speak of a number of
places in Thrace. There is no object in multiply-
ing the monotonous tale of horror, for the uniform
directions from Constantinople^ were carried out
With the exception of six small villages in the
( iii.-fan hills.
| " I could not bring myself to believe that it was by
order of the Central Government that the Armenians
driven from their homes. It wag only at Constanti-
nople that I learnt this fact, and I learnt also that the
pressure brought to boar by the Embassies had had no
effect." — Extract from a letter (written by an Armenian
Protestant to an American citizen) which was published
on September -1th, 1915, bv the Armenian paper
" Go&ehnag " of New York.
29
with remarkable exactitude by the local authori-
ties. Only two cases are reported of officials who
refused to obey the Government's instructions.
One was the local governor of Everek, in the
district of Kaisarieh, and he was at once replaced
by a more pliable successor. On the other hand,
the kaimakam of another place replied to the
protest of a German missionary : " If the Law and
the Sultan were to forbid it, I would carry out the
plan in spite of all, and do as I . please."
(American Committee's Report.)* In general
what happened was this.
On a given day the streets of whatever town it
might be were occupied by the local gendarmerie
with fixed bayonets, and the Governor summoned
all able-bodied men of Armenian race that had
been exempted from military draft to present
themselves now on pain of death. " Able-bodied "
received a liberal interpretation, for it included any
male between fifteen and seventy years of age, and
these were all marched out of the town by the
gendarmes. They had not far to go, for the
gendarmerie had been reinforced for the purpose from
the gaols, and the brigands and Kurds at large were
waiting in the hills. They were waiting to murder
* Hereafter referred to as A.O.R.
o
0
the prisoners. The first seconded valley witnessed
their wholesale massacre, and, acquitted of their
task, the gendarmes marched back leisurely into
town.
This was the first act. It precluded the pitiful
possibility of resistance to the second, which
was of a more ingenious and far reaching kind.
The women, old men and children who made up
the remainder of the Armenian population, were
now given immediate notice of deportation within
a fixed term — a week perhaps, or ten days, but
commonly a week, and in no case more than a
fortnight. They were to be unrooted, whole
households, from their homes, and driven off to an
unknown destination, while their houses and
property were to be transferred to Moslems, on a
plan which will be described in the sequel.
It is hardly possible to imagine to oneself the
implication of such a decree. These were not
savages, like the Red Indians who retired before
the White Man across the American continent.
They were not nomadic shepherds like their
barbarous neighbours the Kurds. They were
people living the same life as ourselves, towns-
people established in the town for genera-
tions and the chief authors of its local pros-
perity. They were sedentary people, doctors
and lawyers and teachers, business men and
31
ans and shopkeepers, and they had raised solid
monuments to their intelligence and industry,
costly churches and well-appointed schools. Their
women were as delicate, as refined, as unused to
hardship and brutality as women in Europe or the
United States. In fact, they were in the cl
personal touch with Western civilisation, for many
of the Armenian centres upon which the crime was
perpetrated had been served by the American
missions and colleges for at least fifty years, and
were familiar with the fine men and women who
directed them.
Communities like this, after being mutilate .1 by
the wholesale conscription or assassination of the
husbands and fathers, were now torn up by the
roots and driven, under the forlorn leadership of
the mothers and the old men, into an exile that
was to terminate in a death of unspeakable horror.
There was just one possible loophole of escape,
apostasy, but it did not do to bid for it too eagerly.
It had been available in 1895, and the men of one
town on the Euphrates now sought for it: to avert
their doom.* But their desperate offer was refused ;
and at another town in Anatolia it was only
accepted on the inhuman condition of surrendering
their children below the age of twelve years to
* Hoping to return to Christianity in better 'lays.
32
the Government, to be educated in unknown
" orphanages " in the Moslem faith.
Of course these orphanages were quite hypo-
thetical institutions. There were dervish convents,
however, which were real and terrible enough.
The dervishes are communities of fanatical Moslem
devotees, many of whom lead a wandering life in
the interior of Anatolia- — a barbaric survival of
primitive religion. They were allowed to take
their choice of the young Armenian boys, and one
of Lord Bryce's informants describes how bands of
them met the caravans of deported Armenians on
their road, and carried off children, shrieking with
terror, to bring them up as Moslems in their savage
fraternity.
In one place "a plan was formed to save the
children by placing them in schools or orphanages,
under the care of a committee organised and sup-
ported by the Greek Archbishop, of which the Vali
was president and the Archbishop vice-president,
with three Mohammedan and three Christian mem-
bers." (A.C.R.) But the plan was rescinded by
orders from above ; and
" many of the boys appear to have been sent to
another district, to be distributed among the farmers.
The best looking of the older girls are kept in houses
for the pleasure of members of the gang who seem to
rule affairs here. I hear on good authority that a
member of the ' Committee of Union and Progress '
33
here has ten of fche handsomest girls id a ii i le in the
central part of tbo city, for the Oft -If and
his friends." (A.C.R.)
The Armenian journal '• Horizon" of Tiflis,
reported in its issue of Sept. 4th (Aug. 22nd old
style) that : —
" A telegram from Bukaresc states thai the Turks
have sent from Anatolia four railway-vans full of
Armenian orphans from the interior of the country,
to distribute them among the Moslem families.*1
Such was the fate marked out for the Armenian
children who were young enough lor assimilation ;
but even such a sacrifice was to "reprieve" the
parents who consented to it from immediate death
alone, and not from the lingering torment of
deportation.
Only at one place do we hear that the victims
were given the prospect of ransoming themselves
completely by accepting Islam for their families
and themselves. Here the witness states that
" The offices of the lawyer- who recorded applica-
tions were crowded with people petitioning to
become Mohammedans. Many did it for the sake of
their women and children " (A.C.K.)
But their escape was a converts
were marched out of the town like the rest, and
were never heard of again.
The majority of the people were not suffered even
to play with hopes of security, and the week
u
of grace was occupied by heartrending scenes.
At the last mentioned town " people made prepara-
tion for carrying out the Government's orders by
selling whatever household possessions they could
in the streets. Articles were sold at less than
10 per cent, of their usual value, and Turks from
the neighbouring villages filled the streets, hunting
for bargains " (A.C.R.) In this instance the
Government punished any Moslems that actually
seized articles by force ; but in general the authori-
ties were not so meticulous. It must be repeated
that the Armenians were people of property,
property well earned by intelligent industry, and
the indigent Moslem of the slums had always
resented the prosperity which Allah had permitted
to the subject infidel. Now the Moslem was tc
come into his own. At a port on the Cilician coast
" sewing machines sold for 1J- medjidiehs (about
four shillings and ninepence), iron bedsteads for a
few piastres," and at a hitherto flourishing port
on the Black Sea we are showm a spectacle of
wholesale felony.
" The thousand Armenian houses in the town are
being emptied of furniture by the police one after
the other . . . , and a crowd of Turkish women
and children follow the police about like a lot of
vultures, and seize anything they can lay their hands
on ; and when the more valuable things are carried
out of a house by the police, they rush in and take
35
the balance. I see this performance every day with
my own eyes. I suppose it will take several weekg
to empty all the houses, and then the Armenian
shops and stores will be cleared out." (A.C.R.)
A systematic eradication of a whole people, this,
and designed to that end, for the German consul
told the witness that " He did not believe the
Armenians would be permitted to return to the
city in question, even after the end of the war."
(A.C.R.)
But the Armenians gained little by selling up
their goods, for even the trifling sums they realised
were more than they were permitted to carry with
them. Their journey money was strictly limited
to a few shillings, and in fact it would only have
exposed them to pillage by their guards if they
had attempted to carry more about their persons.
Yet if they could not realise their property, there
was still less hope of transporting it with them.
In many cases the notice was too short for selling
out or packing up at all, and this seems to have
been especially the case in Cilicia.
" At the mountain village of Geben," for instance
" the women were at the wash - tub, and were
compelled to leave their wet clothes in the water and
take the road barefuoted and half -clad, just as they
were. In some cases they were able to carry part of
their scanty household furniture or implements of
agriculture, but for the most part they were neither
to carry anything nor to sell it, even where there was
time to do so." (A.C.R.)
36
" In Hadjin well-to-do people, who Lad prepared
food and bedding for the road, were obliged to leave
it in the street, and afterwards suffered greatly from
hrmger," (A.O30
The exiles bad reason to be thankful if they could
tind conveyance for their own persons. Sometimes
the government announced that it would provide
an ox-cart for each family. But this was often
only another opportunity for mocker}7. In one
place, where the people had been given notice to
depart on Wednesday, the carts appeared on Tuesday
;\r 3.30 a.m., and the people were ordered to leave
at once. ': Some were draped from their beds
without even sufficient clothing." In other cases
no provision was made at all. For example, at the
aforementioned city on the Black Sea coast, the
Governor-General told the witness that " the
Armenians were allowed to make arrangements for
Carriages." " But nobody," says the witness,
" seemed to be making any arrangements. I know
of one wealthy merchant, however, who paid. £15
(Turkish) for a carriage to take himself and his
wife . . . But about ten minutes drive From
the start, they were commanded by the gendarmes
to leave the carriage, which was sent back to the
city." And it was always the same tale • for the
owners of the vehicles were always local Moslems,
who had no intention of accompanying the gruesome
caravan to its distant destination. After one day's
37
march, or two, when the victim's last pence had
been extorted in bribes, the drivers turned their
oxen about. Often the second batch of a convoy,
as it started, saw the carts assigned to the first batch
returning empty to the town, and realised that they
would have to travel the greater part of their
immense journey over the mountains on foot.*
From the impression it made on the witnesses,
the scene of departure must in any case have been
harrowing enough. From that town on the coast
the exiles were despatched in successive batches of
about 2,000 each.
"The weeping and wailing of the women and
children was most heartrending. Some of these
people were from wealthy and refined circles, some
were accustomed to luxury and ease. There were
clergymen, merchants, bankers, lawyers, mechanics
* For example, the following incident is related in a
letter, printed by the New York paper " Gotchnag " on
September 4th, to which reference has been made
already : —
" When the Government announced that the
Armenian population must remove from a certain
inland town in Eastern Anatolia, an American
missionary, Miss X., obtained permission to ac-
company the deported people. She bought a car-
riage, eight carts and six donkeys, for the use of
the pupils and teachers of the missionary school on
their journey. The Government had placed an
ox-cart at the disposal of each family, bat no one
knows exactly how far the unfortunate deported
families have been able to ride, or at what moment
they have been compelled to go on foot."
38
tailors, and men from every walk of life
The whole Mohammedan population knew that these
people were to be their prey from the beginning, and
<h..y v, . animals." (A.C.R.)
And nor,' is another description from a different
place :
•'Ail [he morning the ox-carts creaked out of the
town, laden with women and children, and here and
there a man who had escaped the previous deporta-
tions. The women and girls all wore the Turkish
costume, that their faces might not bo exposed to the
gaze <:( drivers and gendarmes— a brutal lot of men
brought in from other regions
The panic in the city was terrible. The people
full that the Government was determined to exter-
minate the Armenian race, and they were powerless
to resist. The people were sin'.' that the men were
being killed and the women kidnapped. Many of
the convicts in the prisons had been released,
and the mountains around were foil of bands of
outlaws
Most of the Armenians iu the district were abso-
lutely hopeless. Many said it was worse than a
massacre. No one knew what was coming, but all
i'eli- that it was the end. Even the pastors and leaders
couW offer no word of encouragement or hope. Many
began to doubi even the existence of God.0 Under
the -train many individuals became demented,
some of them permanently."' (A.C.R.)
* .V repetition of a case which is reported from the
massacres of 1909, when a woman who had seen her child
burnt alive in the village church, answered her would-be
comforters: " Don't you see what ha^ happened? God
has grone mad."
39
III. THE ROAD TO DEATH.
In this agonising state of apprehension the bands
of Armenian women were driven forth on their
road. There was a heroism about their exodus,
for there was still a loophole of eseape, the same
alternative of apostasy that had tempted their
husbands and fathers. And in their case, at least,
apostasy brought the certainty of life, because the
condition laid down was their immediate entrance
into the harem of a Turk. Life at the price of
honour — most of them seem to have rejected it :
and yet, if they had known all that lay before
them, they might have judged it the better part.
As it was, they clutched at the desperate chance of
immunity, and presented themselves for the march
- — playing too unsuspectingly into their conductors'
hands. For the gaol-bred gendarmes had no
;tion of conducting the caravan -intact to its
destination.
Some were sold into shame before the march
began. " One Moslem reported that a gendarme
had offered to sell him two girls for a medjidieh
(about three shillings and twopence)". They sold
the youngest and most handsome at every village
40
where they passed the night ; and these girls have
been trafficked in hundreds through the brothels
of the Ottoman Empire. Abundant news has
come from Constantinople itself of their being
sold for a few shillings in the open markets of
the capital ; and one piece of evidence in Lord
Bryce's possession comes from a girl no more
than ten years old, who was carried with this
object from a town of North Eastern Anatolia to
the shores of the Bosphorus. These were Christian
women, as civilised and refined as the women of
Western Europe, and they were enslaved into
degradation. Yet they were more fortunate than
their companions who were denied even this release
from their terrible journey ; and these \vere old
women, mothers of families, mothers actually with
child, who were herded on to meet the intolerable
hardships which their journey held in store.
" Women with little children in their arms, or in
the last days of pregnancy, were driven along under
the whip like cattle. Three different cases came
under my knowledge where the woman was de-
livered on the road, and because her brutal driver
hurried her along she died of hemorrhage. Some
women became so completely worn out and helpless
that they left their infants beside the road." (A.C.R.)
This latter fact is witnessed from several
quarters. One piece of evidence tells of a woman
throwing her dying child down a well, that
she might be spared the sight of its )ast agony.*
Another woman, stifle I in a crowded rattle-truck
on the Anatolian Railway, threw her baby onto the
line.
" Six agonised mothers, passing through Konieb
by this railway to an unknown destination, entrusted
their little children to the Armenian families in
the city iu order to save them alive; but the local
authorities tore them away from the Armenians and
placed them in Moslem hands."
This last incident comes from the confidential
letter to a high Armenian ecclesiastic which has
been mentioned above ; and testimony from the
American Committee's Report only heightens the
horror.
"An Armenian told me thai he had abandoned
two children on the way because they could nor
walk, and that he did not know whether they had
died of cold and hunger, whether a charitable soul
had taken care of them, or whether they had become
the prey of wild beasts. Many children seem to
have been thus abandoned. One seems to have been
thrown into a well."
The same incident is recorded by a first-hand witness
who had come to Constantinople from the interior, and
whose general description of the deportations (which tallies
exactly with the personal narratives given here) has been
resumed by Prof. Hagopian in an article published on
September 1st. 101."), by the paper "Armenia" of
Marseilles. .
42
This confirms the entirely independent testi-
mony to the same incident from another source,
and there is evidence of equal weight for many
other incidents of equal horror.
" I saw a girl three and a half years old, wearing
only a shirt in rags. She had come on foot . . .
She was terribly spare, and was shivering from cold,
as were also all the innumerable children I saw on
that day." (A.C.R.)
Here is a witness who saw one of these
caravans on its road.
" They went slowly, most of them fainting from
want of food. We saw a father walking with a one-
day-old baby in his arms, and behind him the
mother walking as well as possible, pushed by the
stick of the Turkish guard. It was not uncommon
to see a woman fall down and then rise again under
the stick." (A.C.R.)
"A young woman, whose husband had been
imprisoned, was carried away with her fifteen-days-
old baby, with one donkey for all her luggage.
Aft r one day and a half of travel, a soldier stole her
donkey, and she had to go on foot, her baby in her
arms." (A.C.R.)
But the robbery of their goods was not the
worst. These poor, worn-out, perishing women
were robbed obscenely of their honour, for any
who had not brought a few shillings into the gen-
darmes' pockets by being sold to richer Moslems
were abandoned to the gendarmes' own more
brutal lust.
43
" At one place the commander of gendarmerie
openly told the men to whom he consigned a large
company, that they were at liberty to do what they
chosa with the women and girls." (xl.C.R.)
"The Armenians deported from a certain town,"
says another witness who saw them puss, "could not
be recognised as a result of their twelve days'
march . . . Even in this deplorable state,
rapes and violent acts are every day occurrences."
(A.C.R.)
Age was the only ground of exemption from
outrage, and there were women of extreme age in
these caravans ; for neither age nor sickness gave
exemption from slow murder by deportation.
" A case worthy of notice was that of F.'s sister.
Her husband had worked in our hospiUl as a soldier-
nurse for many months. She contracted typhus
and was brought to our hospital . . . . A few
days before the deportation, the husband was im-
prisoned and exiled without examination or fault.
When the quarter in which they lived went, the
mother got out of bed in the hospital, and was put
on an ox-cart to go with her children." (A.C.R.)
Indeed, the sick and aged could be trusted to die on
the road of their own accord.
" The women believed that they were going to
worse than death, and many carried poison in their
pockets to use if necessary. Some carried picks and
shovels to bur y those they knew would die by the
wayside." (A.C.R.)*
* The same incident is reported in a document trans-
mitted to Lord Bryce. The names of all the parties
concerned are given with exactitude in both acoounts.
44
Sometimes their misery was ended unexpectedly
soon, when their tormentors gave? way prematurely
to their Inst for blood. At one small village the
whole tragedy was enacted in one scene.
'* Forty-five men and women were taken a short
distance from the village into the valley. The
women were first outraged by the officers of the
gendarmerie, and then turned over to the gendarmes
to dispose of. According to this witness, a child was
killed by having its brains beaten out on a rock.
The men were all killed, and not a single person
survived out of this group of forty-five." (A.C.R.)
1,1 The forced exodus of the last part of the
Armenian population from a certain district took
place on June 1st, 1915. All the villages, as well
as three-quarters of the town, had already been
evacuated. An escort of fifteen gendarmes followed
the third convoy, which included 4,000 to 5,000
persons. The prefect of the city had wished them
a pleasant journey. Bat at a few hours' distance
from the town, the caravan was surrounded by
bunds of a brigand-tribe, and by a mob of Turkish
peasants armed with guns, axes and clubs. They
3rst began plundering their victims, searching care,
fully even (be very young children. The gendarmes
sold to tin- Turkish peasants what they could not
carry away with them. After they had taken even
the food of these unhappy people, the massacre of
the males began, including two priests, one of whom
was ninety. In six or seven days all males above
fifteen years of age had been murdered. It was the
beginning of the end. People on hor^e-back raised
45
the veils of the women, and curried off the pretty
ones." (A.C.R.)
And here is the same story at first hand (A.C.U.),
from a lady who actually experienced the horrors
of this murderous march.
She tells how the crime began with the hanging
of the Bishop and seven other notables, and the
wholesale slaughter in a wood of about eighty men,
after they had been imprisoned and flogged in
prison. " The rest of the population was sent off
in three batches ; I was among the third batch.
My husband died eight years ago, leaving me and
my mother and my eight-year-old daughter exten
sive possessions, so that we were living in comfort
Since mobilisation, an Ottoman commandant has
been living in my house free of rent. He told me
not to go, but I felt I must share the fate of my
people. I took three horses with me, loaded with
provisions. My daughter had some five-lira pieces
round her neck, and I carried some twenty liras
an I four diamond ring] on my parson. All
else that we had was left behind. Our party left
on June 1st (old style), fifteen gendarmes going
with us."
Then she describes, detail for detail, the surprise
attack on the road, the killing of the two priests
and of every male over fifteen years of age. Their
horses, their valuables, their food — all were taken.
" Very many women and girls were carried off to
the mountains, among them my sister, whose one-
year-old baby they threw away. A Turk picked it
up and carried it off, 1 know not where. My mother
46
walked till she could walk no further, and dropped
by the roadside, on a mountain top. We found on
the road many who had been in the previous
batches ; some women were among the killed, with
their husbands and sons. "We also come across some
old people and their infants, still alive but in a
pitiful condition, having shouted their voices away."
And here again the former witness exactly
corroborates the narrative.
" On the way," says this other testimony, " we
constantly met murdered men and youths, all
covered with blood. There were also women and
girls killed near their husbands or sons. On the
heights of the mountains and in the depths of the
valleys numbers of old men and babies were lying
on the ground."
They were on the track of the preceding
convoys and the same picture of death is given
by witnesses who followed the route of another
caravan a short way from its starting point.
" Many persons were obliged to start off on foot
without funds and with what they could gather up
from their homes and carry on their backs. Such
persons naturally soon became so weak that they
fell behind and were bayoneted and thrown into the
river, and their bodies floated down to the sea, or
lodged in the shallow river on rocks, where they
remained for ten or twelve days and putrefied.'-'
Yer those were fortunate who found even such
a death, tor they escaped the increasing torments
which the survivors had to suffer.
47
"We were not allowed to sleep at night in the
villages," says the Armenian lady, "bul lay down
outside. Under cover of the night i bable
deeds were committed by the gendarmes, brigands
and villagers. Many of us died from hnnger and
strokes of apoplexy. Others were lefl by the road-
side, too feeble to go on." The parallel account
confirms her once more in almost identical won Is,
and adds that "the peoplo found themselves in the
necessity of eating grass."
Yet even so, many failed to succumb, and the
warders had to thin the ranks by still more drastic
means.
"The worst and most unimaginable horrors,"
the lady continues, "were reserved for us at the
banks of the (Western) Euphrates (Kara Su) and
the Brzindjan plain. The mutilated bodies of women,
girls audi lir.lt> children made everybody shudder.
The brigands were doing all sort.- of awful deeds to
the women and girls that were with us, whose cries
went up to heaven. At the Euphrates, the I
and gendarmes threw into the river all the v< m lining
children under fifteen years old. Those who could
swim were shot down as they struggled in the water."
But the narrator was condemned to outlive this
spectacle " On the next stage of the journey, the
fields and hill-sides were dotted with swollen and
blackened corpses, which filled and fouled th
with their stench." It was not till the thirty-
second day of their march that they reached a
temporary halting place, where the narrative comes
to an end.
48
What has been this woman's subsequent fate we
do not know, for the halting place was less than
half way to her final destination, and it is im-
possible to conceive the suffering already crowded
into that first month". The mere physical cruelty
of it is appalling — a delicate lady driven thirty-
two clays' journey on foot through some of the
roughest mountain-country in the world. The
spiritual torment could perhaps only be fathomed
by actual experience. And this is only one nar-
rative out of scores, chosen here because it is
delivered with exactitude by the mouth of two
witnesses, not because it is in any way unique.
On the contrary, the same horrors were being
enacted in hundreds of Anatolian towns and villages
and over thousands of miles of savage mountain
trails, enacted and repeated from the month of
April till the present moment. And the narra-
tives are not open to doubt. Those gathered
together in the American Committee's Report
were all recorded and endorsed by authoritative
auditors. And they are not vague denunciations,
or highly coloured generalisations. There are, of
course, many general accounts of these atrocities
in addition to these individual testimonies ; but
they, too, are remarkably free from vagueness and
exaggeration, and when they are compared with
the first-hand evidence, they show agreement with
it even in minute details.
49
For instance there ia Professor Hagopian's resume
(published in the " Armenia" of Marseilles on
September 1st. 1915) of. the genera] impressions
gathered by a witness who had recently come from
the interior of Anatolia to Constantinople. He
describes, soberly and exactly, the gangs of
prisoners being driven across the mountains, the
blows of the gendarmes, the children born on the
road, the mothers and old men dying of ex-
haustion, even the incident of the woman throwing
her baby into the well (see p. 41 above).
The somewhat longer description, given in i}io,
letter to a high Armenian ecclesiastic in neutral
territory, is so remarkable in its agreement that
certain passages deserve to be quoted in illustration.
"In four provinces," says this letter, "the local
authorities gave facilities to those condemned to
deportation — five or ten days' grace, permission to
execute a partial sale of their property, and the
privilege of hiring a cart between several families ;
but, at the end of several days, the carters left
them on the road and returned to i^wn. The
caravans tints formed used to meet on the morrow,
or sometimes several days aftei' their start, with
lands of brigands, or chc with Moslem peasants,
who plundered them of everything. The hands
fraternised with the gendarmes, and killed the few
men or boys included in theearavans. They carried
off' tli > women, girls and children, leaving only the
50
old women, who were driven along by the gendarmes
with blows of the whip and died of hunger on the
roacl. A. first-hand witness tells us how the women
deported from a certain province were left, after
several days, in the plain of Kharpont, where they
all died of starvation (fifty or sixty a day) : and the
authorities have merely sent a few people to bury
them, so as not to endanger the health of the Moslem
population .
" The caravans of women and children are exposed
in front of the Government buildings in every town
or village where they pass, in order that the Moslems
may take their choice.
" The caravan despatched from [the actual town
from which the lady was deported whose narrative
we have quoted above] was thinned out in this
fashion, and the ivomcn and children who remained
over were thrown into the Euphrates at the jjlace
called Kemakh-Boghazi, just outside Erzindjan."
This passage is particularly important, because
it relates events for which we already have the
evidence of two quite independent, first-hand
witnesses. Anyone who compares the italicised
sentences with the extracts quoted from the
Armenian lady and her fellow-victim immediately
above, will see that the general report — the story
as it circulated through the interior of Anatolia
and travelled to Constantinople and Marseilles — is
very far from being exaggerated. It is less grue-
51
some, less extreme, in its details, than the original
testimony itself ; and this evident sobriety of the
general rumour, in a case where we can put it to
the test, must obviously strengthen our belief in
cases where the facts alleged are supported by
secondary evidence alone.
This secondary evidence, however, is really
superfluous. The first-hand testimonies arc abun-
dant enough, and convincing enough, to afford in
themselves a thorough exposition of the crime.
They are concrete statements, fortified throughout
by the names of well-known individuals who have
either witnessed these atrocities or been their
victims. For reasons of common prudence these
names have to be withheld ; but anyone who
glances at the American Committee's Report will
see by the number of blanks, where names should
be, how direct and personal this evidence is.
Moreover, the testimony comes from many
independent quarters. From the town where the
Armenian lady's journey was broken, we have the
narrative of a foreign resident, the citizen of a
neutral state. It is a town on the Eastern
Euphrates (Murad Su), a meeting-place of routes
from north to south, and very many convoys of
exiles passed this way.
"If," the resident writes, "it were simply a matter
of beinsr obliged to leave here to go somewhere else.
52
it would not be so bad. but everybody knows it is
a case of going to one's death. If them wis
any doubt about it, it has been removed by the
arrival of a number of parties, aggregating several
thousand people, from Erzeroum and Erzindjan.
I have visited their encampment a number of
times and talked with some of the people. They
are, almost without exception, ragged, filthy, hungry
and ill. That is not surprising, in view of the
fact that they have been on the road for nearly
two months, with no change of clothing, no chance
to wash, no shelter, and little to eat. The Government
has been giving them some scanty rations hero. I
■watched them one time when their food was brought.
Wild animals could not be worse. They rushed upon
the guards who carried the food and the guards beat
them back with clubs, hitting hard enough ro kill
them sometimes. To watch them one could hardly
believe that thes^ people were human beings.
" As one walks through the camp, mothers offer
their children and beg one to take them. In fact, the
Turks have been taking their choice of these children
and girls for slaves, or worse. In fact, they have even
had their doctors there to examine the more likely
girls and thus secure the best ones.
" There are very few men among them, as most of
them have been killed on the road. All tell the same
story of having been attacked and robbed by the
Kurds. Most of them were attacked over and over
again, and a great many of them, especially the men,
were killed. Women and children Were also killed.
Many died, of course, from sickness and exhaustion
53
on tho way, and there have been deaths each day that
they have been here. Several different parties have
arrived and, after remaining a day or two, have been
pushed on with no apparent destination. Those who
have reached here are only a small portion, however,
of thoso who started. By continuing to drive these
people on in this way it will be possible to dispose of
all of them in a comparatively short time.
"Among those with whom I have talked were three
sisters. They had been educated at and spoke
excellent English. They said their family was the
richest in and numbered twenty-five when they
left, but there were now only fourteen survivors.
The other eleven, including the husband of one of
them and their old grandmother, had been butchered
before their eyes by the Kurds. The oldest male
survivor of the family was eight years of age. When
they left , they had money, horse3 and personal
effects, but they had been robbed of everything,
including even their clothing. They said some of
them had been left absolutely naked, and others with
only a single garment, and when they reached a
village their gendarmes obtained clothes for them
from some of the native women.
" Another girl with whom I talked is the daughter
of the Protestant pastor of -. She said every
member of her family with her had been killed, and
she was left entirely alone. These and some others
are a few survivors of the better class of people who
have been exiled. They are being detained in an
abandoned school-house just outside of the town and
no one is allowed to enter it. They said they prac-
54
tically were in prison, although they were allowed to
go to a spring just outside the building. It was there
I happened to see them. All the others are camped
in a large open field with no protection at all from
the sun.
"The condition of: these people indicate-; the fate
of those who have left and are about to leave from
here. I believe nothing has been heard from any of
them as yet, and probably very little will be heard.
The system that is being fallowed seems to be to have
bands of Kurds awaiting them on the road to kill the
men especially and incidentally some of the others.
The entire movement seems to be the most thoroughly
organized and effective massacre this country has
ever seen."
This is the verdict of an eye-witness who saw the
Ottoman Government's scheme in fall progress.
He was witnessing in the twentieth century after
Christ the same horrors that had been perpetrated
in these regions six and eiffht centuries before the
Christian era. When we read that the Assyrian
or Babylonian Government " carried into captivity "
such and such a broken people or tribe, we hardly
seize the meaning of the statement. Even when
we see the process portrayed with grim realism on
the concpterors bas-reliefs, it does not penetrate
our imagination to the quick. But now we know.
It has happened in our world, and the Assyrian's
crime was not so fiendish as the Turk's. "Or-
ganised and effective ■ ■. " -that is what
a.:>
inch a doportati m means, and that must always
iave been its implication. But the Assyrian at
.ny rale gave the remnant a chance of life at the
end of their journey. They received houses and
lands, and often brought a new community to
birth in exile. The Turk was more consistent in
his cruelty. These people were to be deported to
their death, and nothing should reprieve them.
" I believe nothing has been heard from those who
have left from here, and probably very little will
be heard," says the witness. Unfortunately, he
was in error. Certainly most of those who had
been driven over the mountains from the far north
must have perished, as he surmised, on their
terrible journey. But there were others from
Cilicia and Northern Syria who had a shorter road
to travel, and these did not succeed in dying by
the way. They were reserved for the last and
most hideous scene in the drama.
56
ikkRJiAttl
P. O. BOX 707
UNIVERSITY. CALIFORNIA
IV. THE JOURNEY'S END.
The Young Turks' final denouement was not
quite a novelty. They had rehearsed it in minia-
ture some years before, when the " Committee of
Union and Progress" had supplanted the Hamidian
regime at Constantinople, and set itself to eliminate
the abuses of the city. The worst eyesore was the
army of masterless dogs, which had been permitted
by too tolerant generations to establish itself in the
streets, and exercise those functions of scavenger
for which an easy-going municipal administration
had failed to provide by human agency. The
Young Turks dealt promptly and effectively with
these undesirable denizens of their capital. They
collected them on boats and marooned them on
a desert island in the Sea of Marmora, where the
animals solved the problem of their future by
perishing of starvation. When Enver and his
friends were thinking out the problem of the
Armenians last Spring, they did not forget this
successful precedent.
The Armenians, in fact, (or such of them as
survived the process of deportation), were to be
provided for in the same fashion as the Stambouli
0/
dogs, ami two places were selected by the Govern-
ment for their ultimate disposal. One o£ these was
Snltanieh, a tillage -- of the Konia district in the
centre of Anatolia, and the choice was scientifically
made : for Anatolia is a tabled and, with a well-
wooded, well-watered periphery of mountain-
country towards the sea, where the towns are
situated with their Armenian inhabitants, and a
cruel desert in its inland heart, where even the
Turkman nomad can barely maintain his existence.
At Sultanieh, a thousand families of Armenian
townspeople, assembled by weary marches from
every quarter, were given a taste of the wilder]
— a thousand families, and onty fifty grown men
among them,* to provide for the needs of this
helpless flock of women, children and invalids
flung thus suddenly upon their own resources, in
an environment as abnormal to them as it would
be to the middle-class population of any town in
England or France. Having established this
"agricultural colony" on the waste, the Grovern-
* This is vouched for by throe independent testimonies
— a witness in the A.C.R. : the letter written (as in;
evidence shows) by an Armenian Protestant to a citizen
of the U.S., which was published in the Armenian paper
'* (/otcJtiiftr/" oil September 4th, 1015 ; and a letter from
Constantinople, dated June 15th, 11*15, which will be
quoted at greater length below.
58
ment was content, and troubled itself about its
colonists no more.
But Sultanieh was by no means the worst of
the charnel-houses to which the remnant of the
Armenian race was consigned. The greater
number were sent on a longer journey to the
south-east, and were concentrated at Aleppo, the
capital of Northern Syria, for dispersal among the
Arabian provinces beyond.
Between Anatolia and Arabia, the north-
western half of the Ottoman Empire and its
south-eastern adjunct, there is a violent climatic
contrast. The Anatolian highlands are physiologi-
cally akin to Europe, and the Armenians who
dwell in them are not only Europeans in their
civilisation but are accustomed to an essentially
European climate — the same climate that prevails
in the Balkan Peninsula or Austria-Hungary.
But when you descend the last tier of these
highlands, or follow the Euphrates down its gorges
from the Armenian mountains into the Mesopo-
tamian plains, you pass abruptly out of Europe
into country of a semi-tropical character. You
find yourself in Northern Arabia, a vast amphi-
theatre sloping gradually south-eastwards towards
the Persian Gulf, and merging into some of the
most sultry regions on the face of the earth.
This amphitheatre has witnessed many ghastly
59
dramas in its day, but none, perhaps, more ghastly
than the tragedy that is being enacted in it now,
when its torrid climate is bein^ inflicted as a
sentence of death upon the Armenians deported
thither from their temperate homes in the north.
Here is the narrative of a resident at Aleppo who
saw them being herded through that city to their
doom.
The hideous rumour of their pilgrimage had
preceded their arrival, and " at first," he says, " these
stories were not given much credence ; but as many
of the refugees are now arriving in Aleppo, no doubt
any longer remains of the truth of the matter. On
August 2nd, about eight hundred middle-aged and
old women, accompanied by childi"en under the age
of ten years, arrived afoot from Diyarbekir, after
forty-five days en route, and in the most pitiable
condition imaginable. They report the taking of all
the young women and girls by the Kurds, the
pillaging even of the last bit of money and other
belongings, of starvation, of privation, and hardship
of every description. Their deplorable condition
bears out their statements in every detail.
" I am informed that 4,500 persons were sent
from Sughurt to Ras-el-Ain, over 2,000 from
Mezereh to Diyarbekir, and that all the cities of
Bitlis, Mardin, Mosul, Severek, Malatia, Besneh,
&c, have been depopulated of Armenians, the men
and boys and many of the women killed, and the
balance scattered throughout the country. If this
is true, of which there is little doubt, even the
3
60
latter must naturally die of fatigue, hunger and
disease, The Governor of Dor-el-Zor, who is now
at Aleppo, says there are 15,000 Armenians in his
city. Children are frequently sold to prevent
starvation, as the Government furnishes practically
uo subsistence."
To he cast adrift to starve, like the pariah
dogs of Constantinople ! That was the destiny
for which these Armenians had been deported
so many hundred agonising miles. Their penulti-
mate stage at that city on the Murad Su (we
quoted a description by an eye-witness above)
must have seemed to many the culmination of their
misery. Bat here in Aleppo they were suffering
something worse, and the worst of all was still to
come. We are introduced to it by the sinister name
of Der-el-Zor. Aleppo lies in an oasis of the desert,
and the river which waters it buries itself in
swamps about a day's journey to the south-east of
tb.c city. These swamps were allotted to the first
comers; but they did not suffice for .so great a.
company, and the later batches were forwarded five
days' journey further on, to the town of Der-el-Zor,
the capital of the next province down the course of
the Euphrates, where the river takes its way
rds the Persian Gulf through the scorching-
pes of the Arabian amphitheatre.
On these final marches the victims suffered a
change of tormentors. The Kurds lingered in the
61
hills, and the Bedawin Arabs took up their role.
" These poor victims of their oppressors' lust and
hate might better have died by the bullet in their
mountain home than be dragged about the country
in this way. Many hundreds have died from
starvation and abuse along the roadside, and nearly
all are dying of starvation, of thirst, of being
kidnapped by the Anazeh Arabs in the desert
where they have been taken " — Arabs who them-
selves succumb to starvation in their native
wilderness, as another witness points out. And so
they came to Der-el-Zor.
We have a detailed account of what is happening
at Der-el-Zor, from a particularly trustworthy
source — the testimony of Friiulein Beatrice Kohner,
a Swiss missionary from Basle. Friiulein Rohner
has personally witnessed the sufferings of the
Armenians at Der-el-Zor, and has published her
description of them in the " Sonnenaufgang "
(Sunrise), the organ of the " Deutscher Hilfsbund
fur Christliches Liebeswerk im Orient " (German
League of Help for Work of Christian Charity in
the East). Here are some extracts from her
narrative :
" At Der-el-Zor, a large town in the desert, about
six days drive from Aleppo, we saw a big Khan, all
the rooms, the roof and the verandahs of which were
crowded with Armenians, composed mostly of wonieu
02
anil children, with, a few old inon. They had slept
on their blankets wherever they could find any shade.
" For those mountaineers the desert climate is
terrible. On the next day I reached a large Armenian
camp of goat-skin tents, but most of the unfortunate
people were sleeping out in the sun on the burning
Bands. The Turks had given them a day's rest on
account of the large number of sick. It was evident
from their clothing that these people had been
well-to-do ; they were natives of Geben, another
village near Zeitoun, and were led by their religious
head. It was a daily occurrence for five or six of the
children of these people to die by the wayside. They
were just burying a young woman, the mother of a
little girl nine year3 of age, and they besought me to
take this little girl with me.
"Those who have no experience of the desert
cannot picture to themselves the sufferings entailed
by such a journey — a hilly desert without shade
marching over rough and rugged rocks, unable to
satisfy one's scorching thirst from the muddy waters
of the Euphrates, which winds its course along in
close proximity.
" On the next day I met another carnp of theje
Zeitoun Armenians. There were the same indescrib-
able sufferings, the same accounts of misery — * Why
do they not kill us once for all ? * rfSked they. ' For
days we have no water to drink, and our children are
crying for water. At night the Arabs attack us ; they
steal our bedding, our clothes that we have been able
to get together ; they carry away by force our girls,
and outrage our women. If anv of us are unable to
f>3
walk, the convoy of gendarmes beat us. Some of owe
women threw themselves down from the rocks into
the Euphrates in order to save their honour — some of
these with their infants in their arms."
We read the same horrors in brief in an article
(referred to above) which Professor Hagopian
contributed to the Journal "Armenia" of Marseilles
on September 1st, 1915 :
" These unhappy deported people (belonging in
great part to Zeitoun) have been chiefly deposited in
two places — one section of them in a swampy region,
which has hitherto remained uninhabited on account
of the deadly malaria ; while the remainder have
been sent to a still more unhealthy place in the
direction of the Persian Gulf (i.e. Der-el-Zor) so bad
that they have begged to be sent to the swamps ; but
their petition has not been granted."
Yet there was nothing but death in the swamps.
" The malaria makes ravages among them, because
of the complete lack of food and shelter. How
cruelly ironic to think that the Government protends
to be sending them there to found a colony : and
they have no ploughs, no seeds to sow, no bread, no
abodes ; in fact they are sent with empty hands.''
(A.C.R.)
" When the refugees first came to Aleppo," the
same witness relates, " the Christian population
bought food and clothes for them ; but the Vali
refused to allow them any communication with the
refugees, pretending that they had all they wanted
64
A few days later they could get the help they
needed." In other words, the Government's
scheme was baffled by the local Christians'
importunity — yet not for long.
" The Armenian population of Cilicia which has
been exiled to. the provinces of Aleppo, Der-el-Zor,
and Damascus, will certainly die of hunger.
" According to our information, the Government
has refused to leave in ihe;r homes even the
insignificant Armenian colonies at Aleppo and Ourfa,
who might otherwise have succoured their unhappy
brethren who have been driven farther south ; and
the Katholikos of Cilicia, who is still at Aleppo, is
busy distributing the succour which we are sending
him."
This is from the often quoted letter dated
August 15th, 1915, and addressed to a high
Armenian ecclesiastic on neutral territory. It
shows how the Armenian Katholikos of Cilicia, the
most prominent representative of his nation in
the vicinity, exerted himself to bring succour
when the local Christians had failed. And this is
borne out by an earlier letter from Constantinople,
dated June 15th, 1915, and published on August
28th, by the Armenian paper " Gotchnag " of
New York :
" Amongst the thousand families deported to Sul-
tanieh, there are scarcely fifty men. Most have made
the journey on foot, some of the old women and of
the infants have died on the road, youug women with
child have had miscarriages, and have been left on
the mountains. Even at this moment, in their place
of exile, these deported people produce a dozen
victims daily, the toll of disease and hunger. At
Aleppo it requires at the present £35 (Turkish) per
diem to supply the deported people with bread. You
can imagine to yourself what must be their situa-
tion in the deserts where even rhe native araba arc
famished.
"A sum of money has been sent from Constanti-
nople to the Katholikos of Cilicia who is now at
Aleppo, witness of the misery ami agony of his flock.
Here, at least, the authorities allow the distribution
of succour to these unfortunates. At Sultanieh it has
so far proved impossible to bring help within their
reach, for the Government refuses permission, in
spite of the efforts of the American Embassy.11
These efforts of foreign philanthropy were per-
sistent, but unavailing- Another Armenian paper,
the " Bahag" records, on September 9tib, that —
" A Commission of fi ve members has left America
for Constantinople to help the Armenians in distress.
The Mission is anxious to travel in the interior of the
country to acquaint itself with the situation on the
actual spot and take corresponding action; but the
Turkish Government Las refused them permission."
Thus the Young Turkish Government, when
they had herded the remnant of the Armenians to
their "-.agricultural colonies," insured themselves
GG
against any measures of relief that might at the
eleventh hour have deprived their " Armenian
problem"' of its complete " solution."
Such, in outline, is the story of what has hap-
pened to the Armenian population which was
dwelling in peace and prosperity throughout the
towns and villages of the Ottoman Empire, only
eight months ago. And we have confined our-
selves in the narrative to the " normal " course of
the crime, to the scheme as it was organised by
the Government at Constantinople and carried out
in general by their local subordinates. We have
not mentioned the extravagances of wickedness ;
and yet the average of horror was surpassed in
many cases by the initiative of particularly fiendish
governors or particularly brutal gendarmes. Tor-
tures, for instance, of mediaeval cruelty were
commonly practised before their butchery upon the
Armenian men, and the following statement from
a foreign resident in an Anatolian town is supported
by many less detailed allusions :—
" I was called to a house one day, where I saw a
sheet which originated from the prison and which
was being sent to the wash. I got to the bottom of
the matter by the help of two very reliable persons
who witnessed part of it themselves
" The prisoner is put in a room. Gendarmes
standing in twos at both sides and two at the end of
67
the room administer, each in their turn, bastinadoes
as long as they have enough force in them. In the
time of the Romans 40 strokes were administered at
the very most ; in this place, however, 200, 300, 500
and even 800 strokes are administered. The foot
swells up, then bursts open, owing to the numerous
blows. The prisoner is then carried back into tho
prison and to bed by the rest of the prisoners. Tho
prisoners who become unconscious after these blows
are revived by means of cold water, which is thrown
on their heads.
" On the next day, or, more exactly, during the
night, as all ill-treatments are carried on at night in
, as well as in , the whole bastinadoing is
being carried on again in spite of swollen feet and
wounds. I was then in , but in that prison there
were also 30 prisoners in number, and all had their
feet in such a state that they began to burn and had
to be amputated, or were already taken off. A young
man was beaten to death in the space of live minutes.
Apart from the bastinadoing, other methods were
employed, too — such as putting hot irons on the
chest." (A.C.R.)*
But perhaps the most hideous variation on the
official programme was perpetrated by the Gov-
ernor of Trebizond :
" A number of lighters have been loaded with
people at different times and sent off toward . It
* Another testimony, printed in the same report, declares
that " the bastinado was used frequently, as well as fire
torture (in some cases eyes are said to have been put out)."
(A.C.R.)
68
is generally believed that such persons were drov. tied.
During the early days a large caique, or lighter, was
loaded with men supposed to be members of the
Armenian committee and sent off toward . Two
days later a certain Russian subject and one of those
who loft in the boat returned overland to , badly
wounded about the head and so crazy lie could not
make himself understood.
" All he could say was ' Boom ! Boom ! ' He was
arrested, by the authorities and taken to the Munici-
pal Hospital, where he died the following day. A
Turk said this boat was met riot far from by
another boat containing gendarmes, who proceeded to
kill all the men and throw them overboard. They
thought they had killed them all, but this Russian,
who was big and powerful, was only wounded and
swam ashore unnoticed. A number of such caiques
have left loaded with men. and usually they
return empty after a few hours/'
This account is quoted from ;i deposition in the
American Committee's report, and the tale is cor-
roborated from innumerable quarters. It has
travelled through the length and breadth of the
Ottoman Empire, and indeed the evidence for it
was convincing enough. The same witness goes
on to describe how "A number of bodies of women
and children have lately been thrown up by the
sea upon the sandy beach below the walls of the
Italian monastery on this coast, and were buried by
Greek women in the sand where they were found."
6i>
V. FALSE EXCUSES.
All this horror, both the concerted crime and its
local embellishments, was inflicted upon the Arme-
nians without a shadow of provocation. " We are
at war," the Turkish Government will probably
reply ; " We are fighting for our existence. The
Armenians were hoping for the victory of our
enemies ; they were plotting to bring that victory
about. They were traitors at large in a war-zone,
and we were compelled to proceed against them
with military severity." But such excuses are
entirely contradicted by the facts. These Arme-
nians were not inhabitants of a war-zone. None
of the towns and villages from which they were
systematically deported to their death were any-
where near the seat of hostilities. They were all
in the interior of Anatolia, equally far removed
from the Caucasian frontier and from the Dar-
danelles. There was no possibility of their
co-operating with the armies of the Entente, and it
was equall}7 impossible that they should attempt an
insurrection by themselves, for they were not a
compact community. They were scattered in small
settlements over a wide country, and were every
70
where in a minority as compared with their Turkish
neighbours. Civil and military power were safely
in Turkish hands, and the Armenians were parti-
cularly unlikely to attempt a coup de main. It
must be repented that these Armenian townsfolk
were essentially peaceable, industrious people, as
unpractised in arms* and as unfamiliar with the
idea of violence as the urban population in Western
Europe. The Ottoman Government cannot possibly
disguise its crime as a preventive measure, for the
Armenians were so far from harbouring designs
against it beforehand, that they actually forebore
resistance even after the Government had issued
their death-warrant, In fact, there are actually
only two cases recorded in which the deporta-
tion scheme encountered active opposition at all.
There was the successful opposition in the Antioch
district, where the Armenian villagers took to the
hills, and fought for seven weeks with their backs
to the sea till they were almost miraculously rescued
by the French fleet, under circumstances already
relate 1 above. And there was the desperate heroism
of Shabin Kar.diissar, a town in the hinter land of
Trebizond, where -1,000 Armenians took up arms
at the summons to deportation, and held out against
the Turkish troops from the middle of May to the
* For years the Government had taken rigorous measures
to prevent thoni from possessing themselves of rifles.
7J
beginning of July. Then the Turks brought up
reinforcements* and artillery and overwhelmed the
town with case. " Karahissar," it is stated in the
letter to the Armenian ecclesiastic, " was bombarded;
and the whole population, of the country districts
as well as the town, has been massacred without
pity, not excepting the bishop himself." Nothing
could show better than this how little the Turkish
Government had to fear from the Armenians, and
how eagerly it seized upon the quickest means to
their extermination, as soon as an opportunity
appeared.
And this was the Government's procedure to-
wards the helpless, unsuspecting Armenians in the
towns. When it had to deal with the less tiact-
abh peasant communities in the hills, it gave up
any pretence of concealing its intentions, and
without waiting to summon them for deoortation,
at once attacked them nakedly with the sword.
Such was the treatment of Zeitoun, an Armenian
settlement which for eight hundred years had
lived and prospered in virtual independence among
the mountains that overlook the Cilician plain.
The Zeitounlis were distinguished from the other
Armenians of Cilicia. by the possession of" arms,
and they seem to have girded themselves betimes
for the approaching death-struggle. But they
were disarmed, it is said, by the promise that, if
72
they submitted, their defenceless brethren in the
lowland villages would be ransomed from destruc-
tion by their act. The Turkish promise was
broken, of course, as soon as the Turkish object
was secured ; and. taken at such a disadvantage,
the heroic mountaineers inevitably succumbed.
" The bloody curtain has fallen over Zeitoun, and
the fighting stock of these brave mountaineers has
been subdued in this memorable year of crime I As
the faithful followers and remnants of the Roupenian
dynasty, they had hitherto kept their home3 intact
and had successfully withstood the Turkish inroads.
They have at last been overcome by heavy Turkish
forces, and the stronghold of Zeitoun is now in tho
hands of the enemy '.
" It appears that after the failure last winter of the
project.^ I Turkish plan of compaign against the Suez
Canal, Djemal Pasha, the Commander of the Syrian
Army, led a large force of regulars against Zeitoua.
The Zeitounlis entrenched themselves in their fast-
nesses and fought for two or three months against an
enemy which outnumbered them greatly, besides
being by heavy artillery, hoping that rein-
forcements would arrive in time for their support.
But no help came and they fought to their last car-
tridge. It was towards the end of May that Zeitoun
was taken by the Turks, who massacred all the
inhabitants they found. A few hundred old women
are said to have been deported to Angora, and others
to the plains of Mesopotamia, where report says they
ar ■". ejected to grave indignities " — indignities
73
with which we haw been acquainted already in
Fraulein Bonner's description of Dev-el-Zor. and
which xhe writer just quoted would have called by a
stronger name, bad he been acquainted with ber
terrible narrative.
This is the end of Zeitoun, as it is narrated in
the July issue of the London journal " Arc
Zeitoun lias perished, but further Eastward another
peasant community, Sassoun, has been holding the
assassins desperately at bay. Sassoun is a federa-
tion of forty Armenian villages, situated in the
hill country which separates the upper basin of the
Tigris from the gorge of the Murad Su. It ha-
led a semi-independent, almost self-sufficing exist-
ence for centuries, to the chagrin of the Ottoman
Government and the envy of its less prosperous
neighbours the Kurds. At Sassoun A.bd-ul-
Hamid ma-lea preliminary experiment in ma-
in 1895, and in May. 1915. the Young Turk-
marked it i Zeitoun, for destructi<
On Septeml er loth the Armenian journal
11 Horizc - published the foilowii
munication from Tgdir. a - -station on the Ri
Turkish frontier.
"Ayonng man who snoceedcd in escaping from
the viUagi b ol i on August 2nd gives the
following information: — 'Sassoun, too. has bees
74
visited with massacre. The villages of the plain have
all been ravaged. Rouben (one o£ the leaders in the
defence), is still holding out with his lion-hearted
companions, a tiny but invincible band, against the
sinister foe. But his days are numbered. To save
him one would havo to lose no time in putting him
in possession of unlimited quantities of ammunition.' "
The Sassoimlis are men of resource. They have
even learnt to manufacture ammunition from native
materials. But they are being besieged by Turkish
regular troops with heavy guns, and all the Kurds
are on the war path against them. We may hear
any clay that Sassoun has fallen, and that 15,000
more Armenians have been ruthlessly destroyed.
That is how the Turks are dealing with the few
Armenians in a position to defend themselves.
Yet the only sin of Sassoun and Zeitoun has been
their invidious prosperity — a sin which has no
connection whatever with the Avar. In their case
as in the rest, the " war-zone " pretext utterly
breaks down, and there is only one instance in
which it can be put forward with any show of
justification — that of the Armenians resident at
Constantinople itself or in its immediate neigh-
bourhood. These Armenians are perhaps the most
orderly and industrious of any in the Ottoman
Empire, yet as their situation might have enabled
them to work in collusion with the Allied forces at
the Dardanelles, we will examine their treatment
75
for a moment, to .sec whether military considera-
tions may, here at least, have been the real motive
for their deportation. There is ample evidence of
the facts at onr disposal.
" At Adrianople, by order of the Government, all
Armenian officials in administrative, public and
financial institutions have been dismissed. Turkish
soldiers brought in from other districts are com-
mitting unheard-of atrocities. The Armenians are
continually exposed to persecutions. About fifty
Armenians from tie city have been imprisoned or
exiled. The Armenians are forbidden to go abroad,
or even to travel about in the Province.
" The Armenians of Keshan have been deported.
The Armenian boatmen of Silivri have been thrown
into prison on the charge of revichialling the English
submarines.
"The Armenian church and convent at Dbimotika
have been confiscated by the Government. The
Armenians of this locality bave been given two
weeks' grace to emigrate elsewhere. For the depor-
tation of the Armenians of Malgara the same two
weeks' grace has been given. Their houses will be
occupied by the Turks who have emigrated from
Serbia. The Armenians of Tchorlou have been
deported."
This is quoted from a letter written from Con-
stantinople which was published on August 28th
by the Armenian journal " Goichnag " of New
76
York, ami wo may follow the sequel in the " Letter
to an Ecclesiastic'"* so often quoted before : —
•• The scheme has just been put into execution in
lli." very neighbourhood of Constantinople. The
bulk of the Armenians in the district of Ismid and
Province of Broussa have been forcibly removed
to Mesopotamia, leaving their hearths and possessions.
They have likewise removed the population of Ada-
pazar, Ismid, Gegveh, Armacha, and the neighbour-
hood— in fact of all the villages in the Ismid
district, except Bagtchedjik, which has been allowed
a few days' reprieve. . . .
" Now it is the turn of Constantinople, and the
population, which has been stricken with acute
panic, is in any case waiting from moment to
moment for the execution of its doom. The arrests
are innumerable, and those arrested are at once
removed from the capital. Certainly most of them
will not survive. It is the retail shopkeepers, born
in the provinces but settled at Constantinople, that
have been removed up till now, including (six names
' given as specimens). Efforts are being made to save
at least the Armenian population of Constantinople
i'vom this horrible extermination of the Armenian
nation, in order that in the future we may have at
least some point d'appui for the Armenian cause in
Turkey."
■ This letter bears date August 15th, and musr,
therefore, be more recent than one published in New
York on August 28th, considering the time it takes for
the mail to travel from Constantinople to America.
77
But here, too, all efforts were vain. There had
been a preliminary assault upon the Armenians of
the capital as early as June 15th, when twenty-
six of their most prominent representatives were
hanged in public after summary court-martial/*
Yet that had passed, and it would have been a
light enough sacrifice to pay for the immunity of:
the rest. But the Government was only biding
its time. On September^ th, " Gotchnagv reported
that :—
" In all the quarters of Constantinople they have
begun to draw up a register of Armenians, making
separate lists of those who are immigrants from
Armenia and those who were born at Constanti-
nople. It is supposed that they are going to deport
those that came from Armenia."
After this, events followed quickly. On
September 5th, the "Horizon " of Tiflis published a
telegram from Bukarest, announcing that —
"The Turks are continuing their work of exter-
minating the Armenians. From Constantinople they
have deported the Armenian men. Ten thousand
deported men have already been massacred in the
mountains of Ismid."
The official scheme once more in operation !
After reading this, we are not surprised to learn
from other sources that Armenian women and
* Twenty of the names are published in the July
issue of the journal " Ararat."
child m Constantinople and Thrace have
arrived to swell the " agricultural colony " in the
Anatolian desert.
Thus the Armenians of the suburban provinces
been condemned in the end to the same
horrible late as their Anatolian brethren. " Ar-
menian boatmen at Silivri may have revictualled
British .submarine- I" — that is the excuse for it all.
- the real motive. That is revealed in
the i: tal notification that "their houses will
be occupied by Turkish refugees from Serbia," and
re inevitably reminded of Talaat Bey's boast
that ,: after this there will be no Armenian question
for fifty
ion :" is, after all. the cue. " As
the Armenian, the place where he was shall
7 him no more, and the Turk shall inherit his
stance and his dwelling." When we re-read
vidence in this light, we see the signs of such a
policy appeal g sjularity.
"Pout en cleared of Armeni
place the Armenia:.
exiled. The Turks are in perfect delirium.'"
•'More than Armeni :.-. that have been.
:om a certain province, are be!
thrown int ribe#, leai
lens and til!
ahadjirs. I' all
79
unfortunate people have not even graves for their
"As soon as the Armenian refugees left their
houses, niouhadjirs from Thrace took possession of
them. The former had been forbidden to take
anything with them, and they themselves saw all
their goods pass into other hands. There niust be
about 20,000 to 25,000 Turks in this town now, and
the name of the town seems to have been changed to
a Turkish one/'
These three testimonies are taken from the
American Committee's Report ; and here is an
extract from a letter, written from Athens and
dated Jnly 8th, which describes the process of
eupplantation in still more incriminating detail :
''Two missionaries of neutral nationality, with
whom I am personally acquainted, passed through.
Athens yesterday. They just began to inform me
by saying that the condition of the Armenians in
Cilicia was awful. The city of Dortyol. alter having
been evacuated of its Armenian population, has been
occupied by Turkish families. The whole of the
Armenian inhabitants have been sent away, turned
out of their homes, and are naturally suffering from
hunger. The exposure is something that cannot
described. Before evacuation, some nine leading
merchants were hanged . . .
" Zeiioun has met the same fate. There is not a
single Armenian left in Zeitoun, and all the h<
* Extract from ai report dated .Tune 18tb, 1!
so
are occupied by Turkish people. My friends could
not understand exactly what had happened to the
Zeitouniots,* but the fact is that special care has
been taken by the Turkish authorities that too
many of them should not live together. Attempts
have been made to make them Mohammedans, and
it is known that the authorities attempted foTdistri-
bute one, two, or three families to each Turkish
village in the district of Marash.
"They have attempted to do the same thing to
Had j in, but. somehow or other, only half the in-
habitants have left. Naturally the homes of these
have been occupied by Turks.
"The Turks of Tarsos and Adana are showing
the same disposition as they did before the massacres
of 1909.
" Missionaries from Beirout state that the same per-
secution is in force against Christian Syrians."
There could be no more damning pieces of
evidence than these, for they prove incontrovertibly
that the crime against the Armenian race was
deliberate, carefully thought out, and highly
organised in its execution. These " mouhadjirs "
were Moslems from Europe, emigrants from lost
Ottoman provinces which had passed under
Christian rule. They had been mustering since
the Balkan War within the western fringe of the
diminished Ottoman Empire, a drifting, unmarsh-
* After reading Friiulein Rohner's evidence from Der-
el-Zor, we are better informed.
ailed horde And now .suddenly we find them
distributed through the Asiatic provinces, even us
far afield as ( ilicia, in groups nicely proportioned
to the Armenian population in each locality, and
ready at a moment's notice to occupy the
Armenians' places, as soon as the decree for their
deportation had gone forth. "As soon as the
Armenian refugees left their houses, mouhadjirs
from Thrace took possession of them." There is
no hitch here, no saving procrastination. The
organisation is masterly, and conclusive in its
implication. And no consideration was to exempt
any portion of the race from the common doom.
The Armenians who had been conscribed for the
Ottoman army and were actually serving" in its
ranks, might at least have been protected by the
uniform they wore. Instead, their service merely
organised them for the slaughter. We have
mentioned how they were disarmed and put to
labour upon the communications behind the
Caucasian front. Here is the final chapter in their
story.
"The Armenian soldiers, too, nave undergone the
same fate. To begin with, all have been disarmed,
;md are at work constructing roads. We know from
a trustworthy source that the Armenian soldiers of
the province of Erzeroum, at work on the Erzeroum-
Erzindjan road, have all been massacred. The
Armenian soldiers of the province of Diyarbekir
have all been massacred on the Diyarbekir-Ourfa and
82
Diyarbekir-Kharpout roads. However, from Kharpout
1,800 young Armenians were despatched as soldiers
to Diyarbekir to work there. All were massacred in
the neighbourhood of Arghana. "We have no newa
from the other districts, but the same fate has
assuredly been inflicted upon them."
This is an extract from the letter addressed to a
high Armenian ecclesiastic, and it is supported by
the independent and direct testimony of a Moslem
soldier in one of the labour-battalions in question,
who had been on fatigue-duty burying his
massacred Christian comrades. (A.C.R.)
Thus the Ottoman Government sacrificed even
military advantage to the complete execution of its
Armenian scheme ; and the deed is perhaps the
meanest, though far from the most wicked, of all
that it has perpetrated. Yet this, too, has
been done without a shadow of excuse, to
submissive labourers in peaceful districts, separated
by impassable mountains from the seat of war.
"When we turn to what has happened in the real
war-zone, we are confronted with atrocities so
hideous that they could never be palliated by the
most vital military necessity.
83
VI. MURDER OUTRIGHT.
Turkey's eastern war-zone ran through the home-
country of the Armenian race. For we have already
explained that the Armenians murdered by deporta-
tion were not in general the people of Armenia
proper, but for the most part old-established
settlements scattered through the towns of Anatolia
and Cilicia towards the west. In Armenia proper
the Armenians were not confined to the towns ;
the peasantry in the open country was Armenian
as well. In fact, somewhat more than half
the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire were
still concentrated, before the outbreak of war,
in these eastern inarches ; so that the region
defined by the upper courses of the Euphrates and
Tigris on the west and south, and by the Russian
and Persian frontiers on the north and east, was
occupied by a comparatively homogeneous Armenian
population, except for the settlements of intrusive
Kurds. Here was the historical centre of the
nation, its most famous cities, its finest monuments
of architecture and art ; and here, precisely, the
Russian and Ottoman battle lines have swayed to
and fro for nearly a year — a year of disaster for the
Armenian race.
84
In brief, the course of the campaign has been us
follows. In the early winter, almost immediately
after they had intervened in the war, the Turks
look the offensive on a large scale across the
Russian frontier, and sent another army eastward
to invade the Persian province of Azerbaijan ; both
movements broke down, and before the spring
of 1915 their forces had been driven out of
Trans-Caucasia again and compelled to evacuate
Azerbaijan, after a transitory occupation of its
capital Tabriz. When the Russians began to cross
the frontier in their turm the Ottoman authorities
in the border-province of Van let loose the Turkish
troops and Kurdish irregulars on the Armenian
population. In the countryside the Armenians
were overwhelmed, but in the town of Van itself,
when they had seen some of their leading men
murdered, and massacre overshadowing the rest,
they took up arms, expelled the murderers, and
stood a siege of 27 days — 1,500 defenders against
5,000 assailants equipped with artillery — till they
were triumphantly relieved by the advancing
Russians on May 17th, Thereby, the eastern
shore of Lake Van was cleared of the enemy — the
basin of Lake Van is the very heart of Armenia —
and in the early summer months the Russian
forces pushed slowly round the lake towards the
west. But about the end of July, the Turks
received heavy reinforcements, and, resuming the
85
offensive, succeeded in reoccupying Van. Again
after three weeks they were ejected from their
positions, and now the line runs approximately
where it ran in June — right across the basin of Van,
with the lake itself dividing the combatants. Once
more the Russians seem to be slowly forging
ahead, clearing the country of Turk and Kurd.
But the geographical conditions are difficult, and
the enemy is superior in numbers. The Russians
may complete the liberation of -Armenia in time ;
but meanwhile the worst catastrophes have occurred,
and the peasantry that was anxiously awaiting
their arrival has either been annihilated by massacre
or scattered abroad in exile and destitution.
The Turco- Kurdish soldiery began to indulge
itself in atrocities the moment hostilities broke out.
The Persian province of Azerbaijan contains a large
population of Syriac Christians, and the sufferings
of these people at the hands of the invading hordes
are described with terrible detail in letters from
German missionaries* resident among them, letters
which were published on October 18th in the Dutch
newspaper " de Nieuwe Rotter damsche Coura7it."i
* Members of the " Deutsche Orient-Mission."
f The "Courant " is the leading journal of Holland,
and it is by no means inclined to give undue prominence
to facts of ill-savour to Germany or her allies ; for it i3
one of the few Dutch papers that have been privileged
by the German Administration to sell copies in Belgium.
8i
From the contents of these letters we select the
following : —
"The latest" news is that £,000 Syrians and 100
Armenians have died of disease alone, at the missions,
within the last five months. All villages in the
surrounding district, ■with tv, o or three exceptions
have heen plundered and burnt, 20,000 Christians
have b:en slaughtered in Ourmia and its environs
Many churches have been destroyed and burnt, and
also many houses in the town . . . ."
And here is a description (rum another letter : —
" In Haftewan and Salmast 850 corpses, "without
heads, have been recovered from the wells and
cisterns alone. Why ? Because the commanding
officer had put a price on every Christian head. In
Haftewan alone more than 500 women and girls
were delivered to the Kurds at Sandjhulak. One
can imagine the fate of these unfortunate creatures.
In Diliman crowds of Christians were thrown into
prison and compelled to accept Islam. The men
were circumcised. Gulpardjin, the richest village
in the Ourmia province, has been razed to the ground.
The men were slain, the good-looking women and
girls carried away. The same in Babaru. Hundreds
of women jumped into the deep river, when they
saw how many of their sisters were violated by the
hands of brigands, in broad daylight, in the middle
of the road. So also at Miandoab in the Suldus
district."
These atrocities on foreign ground are horrible
enough, but they are altogether dwarfed in scale
*7
by what the Turks have been doing more recently
in their own territory. Their renewed offensive
last July was accompanied by the complete exter-
mination of the Armenian peasantry in the districts
immediately behind their lines, as well as over the
country they traversed in their advance.
The first news of this reached the ': Nov
Vryemya " of Petrograd on July 22nd.
" The Turkish atrocities in the district of Bitlis
are indescribable. After having massacred the
■whole male population of this district, the Turks
collected 9,000 women and children from the sur-
rounding villages, and drove them in upon Bitlis.
Two days later they marched them out to the bank
of the Tigris, shot them all, and threw the 9
corpses into the river.
"On the Euphrates, the Turks have out down
more than 1,000 Armenians, throwing their bodies
into the river. At the same time, four battalions
were ordered to march upan the valley of Moush,
to finish, with the 12,000 Armenians inhabiting this
valley. According to the latest information, the
massacre has already begun. The Armenians are
resisting, but through lack of cartridges they will
all be exterminated by the Turks. All the
Armenians in the Diyarbekir region will likewise
be massacred."
At Moushj at any rate, it was not long before
the ghastly rumour was confirmed. On August
20th the journal t; Horizon''' of Tinis, reported that :
" The Turks have massacred the whole male
population in the plain of Moush. Only 5,000
88
people have succeeded in escaping and finding
refuge at Sassoun, where the insurgent Armenians
are still holding out."
Yet these vaguer narratives were not so terrible
as the more detailed account which found its way a
month later to America, and was published on
September 4th, by the Armenian journal
" Gotchnag " of New York :
"Incredible news comes in about the massacres
at Bitlis. In one village 1,000 Armenians —
men, women and children— have been crowded into
a wooden house, and the house set on fire. In
another large village of the district, only 36
people have escaped the massacre. In another,
they roped together men and women by dozens,
and threw them into the Lake of Van. A young
Armenian of Bitlis, who was in the army, and who,
after being disarmed and employed on road-making,
succeeded in escaping and reaching Van, relates
that the ex-vali of Van, Djevat Bey, has had all
males between the ages of fifteen and forty
massacred at Bitlis. He has had their families
deported in the direction of Sert, but has kept with
him all the prettiest girls. Bitlis is now filled
by tens of thousands of Turkish and Kurdish
mouhadjirs.^
The tragedy of the Armenians in the war- zone
was thus of a different complexion from their
tragedy in the cities of Anatolia. There was more
barbaric crudity here in the manner of their
8'J
destruction, and we miss the fiendish ingenuity of
the deportations. Yet where Enver slew his
thousands, Djevat was slaying his tens of thousands ;
for he was aiming at nothing less than the extinc-
tion of the Armenia!! population in the homeland
of the race.
Yet he did uot altogether succeed. 'The retiring
Russians contested stubbornly every mile of ground,
and won respite for a certain proportion of the
non-combatants to evacuate their threatened homes
m time. On that panic-journey through the
mountains the sufferings of these refugees were
terrible, and there are incidents that rival the
agony of their brethren who were being herded
over those other mountains of Anatolia hundreds
of miles away, under the lash of the Turkish
gendarmes. '; On the road," writes one of the
German missionaries in Azerbaijan, " I found four
little children. The mother sat on the ground, her
back resting against a wall. The hollow-eyed
children ran up to me, stretching out their hands
and crying ; Bread ! Dread ! ' When I came
closer to the mother, \ saw that she was
dying ...."'
Ami here is a description of the whole scene,
from a resident in Trans-Caucasia, who went to the
frontier-village of [gdir to arrange for the reception
90
of the refugees, and watched the harrowing
procession passing by :
" I wonder if it is possible to witness a more
agonising sight than the present one. Human
beings are dying in hundreds from hunger, thirst
and exhaustion, and the means for relieving the
distress are very scanty. There is absolutely no
possibility of even buying bread. The first contingent
of refugees has already reached this place. Owing to
congestion on the roads, the human tide had to be
broken up into two channels : about 100,000 walked
through the plain 01 Abagha, their rear being guarded
by the Russian army under General N. and the
Armenian regiments under Andranig and Dero ;
another 50,000 from the city of Van were diverted
into Persia, their rear being defended by the mounted
regiments of Keri and Hamazasp. Bloody rear-guard
actions are being fought to stem the Turks and Kurds,
wh o are pressing forward in order to cut the line of
retr eat of the Armenians."
As dreadful a spectacle, to the eye, as that which
other witnesses were beholding at Aleppo or at the
crossing of the Murad Su ; and yet what a differ-
ence between the two ! Those fainting exiles from
the Anatolian and Cilician towns were being driven
by remorseless enemies to a lingering death. These
peasants of Van were stumbling forward towards
life and safety, cheered by the knowledge that the
soldiers of a friendly nation were fighting, and
dying, to shield their escape. Yet they had still
91
much* to suffer whan they reached their destinati ':
about the first week in August, 1915.
"All measures which were humauly possible to
welcome this seething mass of humanity had been
taken at Etchmiadzin, but the strain was beyond
anticipation. ' The Fraternal Aid ' Committee, under
the presidency of the Katholikos, and the Medical
Corps were fully represented ; while the National
Bureau of Tiflis, and the Armenian Committees of
Moscow, Bakou and other places, as well as various
societies and unions, had sent men and women
workers. All these tended the sick, the exhausted,
the motherless children, and yet with all this fraternal
aid tendered by the Russian Armenians, the supply
fell far short of the need. Cholera, dysentery and
epotted fever soon showed themselves in a virulent
form ; while the scarcity of commodities in the
Caucasus and local difficulties curtailed the measure
of succour that could be given."
The picture is heart-rending, but it is not the
same picture as " Der-el-Zor," and the bringers of
succour are gradually beginning to cope with the
need.
" About 20,000 orphan children have already been
cared for ; improvised hospitals have been opened in
many localities; hygienic measures have been
adopted to stamp out the epidemics through which
the figure of mortality reached 200 a clay early in
September. Trainloads of flour, sugar, tea, drugs,
clothing and other commodities have been offered by
Armenians throughout Russia. Prof. Kishkin, the
plenipotentiary of the Federation of Russian Zemstvos,
92
who was sent to Etchmiadzin to enquire into the
condition of these refugees, describes the situation as
lamentable, and has asked for £50,000 for immediate
needs.1'*
Yet from one point of \ iew tliis break-down o£
assistance is a factor of hope, for it lias happened
because the stream of refugees lias been so great.
X<> less than 250,000 Armenians from Turkey have
passed alive across the Russian frontier — a large
company compared to the little band of 5,000 that
has found its way to Port Said. This quarter of a
million of homeless, starving, disease-stricken people
is the one hope and stay of the Armenian race. If
they can be saved alive, the vitality of Armenia will
have survived the hideous attempt of the expiring
Turk to blot her out for ever from the r.>]l of
nations. "j"
* Quoted from the September number of the journal
•• .1/ arat " of London.
t The ik Armenian Refugees (Lord Mayor's) Fund " has
been organised to despatch assistance from Great Britain,
and there is really no limit to the amount of money
required. Subscriptions may be forwarded to the
Hon. Secretary of the Fund at %, Victoria Street,
London. S.W.
93
VII. THE TOLL OF DEATH.
A quarter of a million of the Armenians in
Turkey have escaped. But how many have been
destroyed ? The Young Turks and their api dogisi a
in Germany and elsewhere will probably press that
question, for there is no other line o£ apology for
them to adopt. In face of the evidence of which
we have presented a few specimens in these pages,
they will hardly have the face to deny altogether
that this crime has been committed. But they will
submit that it has been perpetrated only in an
exceptional way, and on a comparatively modest
scale.
That would be as shameless a lie as if they
attempted nakedly to deny it. Numerical statistics
are of course very difficult to obtain, for a criminal
always writhes under scrutiny, and in view of the
criminal temper of the Turks, the witnesses have
had to make their observations in a.i unassuming
Way, so as to give the murderers no indication that
note of their actions was being taken. And vet
the few figures we have speak volumes.
For one thing, we know that the batches of de-
ported Armenians averaged between 2,000 and 5,000
94
souls — this we have from many eye-witnesses who
saw i hem pass. And many towns provided more than
(•Me batch — a witness in the American Committee's
reporl tells us, i'or example, that the third convoy
despatched from a certain town included bet wean
4.000 and 5,000 persons. When we remember
th it there are over 50 towns and villages, known to
us by name, from which the Armenian inhabitants
have thus been herded away, we can make a
general estimate of the total number condemned to
deportation throughout the length and breadth of
Anatolia, Cilicia and Armenia proper.
Here are some actual figures compiled on June
20th, by a witness in Cilicia.
" The deportation began some six weeks ago with
180 families from Zeifcoun ; since which time all the
inhabitants of that place and its neighbouring villages
have been deported ; also most of the Christians in
Albistan, and many from Hadjin, Sis, Kars Pazar,
Hassan Beyli and Dort Yol. The numbers involved
are approximately, to date, 26,500. Of these, about
5,000 have been sent to the Konia region, 5,500 are in
Aleppo and surrounding towns and villages, and
the remainder are in Der-el-Zor, Rakka, and various
places in Mesopotamia, even as far as the neigh-
bourhood of Bagdad. The process is still going
on, and there is no telling how far it may be carried.
The orders already issued will bring the number in
95
(hi,-, region up^ to 32,000, and there have been as
none exiled from Ainfcab, and \<:vy few from Marash
and Ourfa."*— (A.C.R.)
These are the figures for a comparatively small
portion oi the whole area over which the deportations
are being carrier! out ; and they only cover the firsi
Bix weeks of a process which has been continuing
ever since, and is still in operation at this present
moment.
And here are later statistics in confirmation.
They show the number of Armenians deported
from sixteen Cilician towns and villages (a fraction
only of the district included in the survey of June
20th above), who passed through one of the con-
centration centres up. to and including Julv 30th,
1915.
The total number. of iamilies was ... iM<;.\
The total number of individuals was 1.3,255
The number of these individuals that
was seni still further afield was ... 3,270
(A.C.R.)
Tines 13,255 individuals, Erom 16 places alone,
passed through one single halting-place ; and we
have no record of the others, deported from the
* The Armenians oi' Ourfa (such of escapi i
murder outright) were of ■ latej on.
See p. t'd above.
96
same localities, who were driven towards the
desert by different routes, and so escaped this
particular witness's observation. And these are
far from being1 the final figures. The witness him-
self adds a postcript to say that 2,100 more have
arrived since his list was made up, and the
deportations, as we have said, have been carried out
continuously ever since.
These figures may show how many started on
the journey ; but what proportion reached their
nominal destination ? We have some figures on
this head likewise from a letter dated August 1 6th,
1915, and written from the interior of Anatolia :
" In haste and in secret, profiting by an opportu-
nity, I hasten to convey to you the cry of agony
which goes up from the survivors of the terrible
crisis through which we are passing at this moment
. . . . An inquiry has proved that out of a
thousand who started, scarcely 100 have reached the
place from which I am writing. Out of the 600 to be
accounted for, 380 men and boys above 1L years of
age, as well as 85 women, have been massacred or
drowned outside the town walls by the gendarmes who
conducted them ; 120 young women and girls and
10 boys have been kidnapped, so that among all these
deported people one does not see a single pretty face.
Among the survivors, 60 per cent, are sick ; they are
shortly to be forwarded to another specified locality,
where certain death awaits them ; it is impossible to
describe the ferocity to which they have been exposed ;
97
they have been travelling for from three to five
months ; they have been pillaged two— three— five-
seven times ; they have even had their underclothes
ransacked ; so far from providing them with food,
they even forbid them to drink water when they are
passing by a stream ; three-quarters of the young
women and girls have been kidnapped ; the rest have
been compelled to spend the night with the gen-
darmes who arc conducting them. Hundreds have
died of these outrages, and the survivors have to tell
of refinements of atrocity so disgusting that one can-
not bear their recital.'1
The same hideous crime in all its details, with
cold statistics to leaven the tale of agony ! The
writer remarks that it is " no hyperbole to say that
there is not a single Armenian left in Armenia, and
there will soon be none left in Cilieia either." All
had been taken, and, of these. 60 per cent, had
perished before they arrive! at their ultimate goal.
And another set of statistic- completely bears out
that estimate. We know that nearly 1,<>00 people
were deported from a certain district on the Kara
Su, and here is an analysis of their " experiences."
••From one village 212 individuals set out, of
Khom 128 (60. per cent.) reached Aleppo alive.
56 men and 11 women were killed on the road,
3 girls and 9 boys were sold or kidnapped, and
5 people were missing.
From the same place another party of ti'.'o people
were deported. 821 (46 per cent.) reached A.leppo,
08
20G men and 57 women were killed en route. 70
girls and young women, and 19 boys, were sold.
23 were missing.
From another village a party of 128 was deported,
of whom 32 (25 per cent.) reached Aleppo alive.
21 men and 12 women were killed en route. 29
girls and young women and 13 boys were sold ; and
18 were missing."
This document bears date July 19th. 1915, and
is signed by the head of a college, who is a
citizen of a neutral country, and is in a position to
know the facts.
Such are the concordant estimates of two in-
dependent witnesses ; and anyone who reads their
narrative, or the other narratives from which we
have quoted above, cannot fail to conclude for him-
self that the percentage of survivors must have been
extraordinarily low. Whatever the exact statistics
in each case, certainly nothing but a remnant evci-
arrived at Sultanieh or Der-el-Zor. The va^t
majority always perished by the way. Yet we
have it on the clear authority of a witness in the
A.C.R., that the German Consul at Aleppo — and
surely this gentleman would not be guilty of
exaggeration — has estimated the number of
Armenians that arrived there, at no less than
30,000. Unfortunately we are not told the date
to which this figure applies : but even if it were
09
the final figure for the most recent date attainable,
it would prove destruction of life on a scale which
not even a German consul, inured to the statistics
of Belgium, could treat as exceptional in character
or inconsiderable in extent.
\ et even if the statistics were more abundant
and more eloquent still, they might fail to convey
to our imagination the actuality of what has
happened. A nation blotted out ! It is easy to
say it with the lips, more difficult to realise what
it means, for it is something totally beyond our
experience. Perhaps nothing brings it home more
crushingly than the record which we have of one
little community of sensitive, refined Armenian
people, and of the terrible fates by which they
were individually overtaken. They were the
members of an educational establishment in a
certain Anatolian town, which was endowed and
directed by a society of foreign missionaries ; and
the following summary is taken directly from a
letter which was written by the President of the
College after the blow had fallen.
" I shall try to banish from my mind for the time
the sense of great personal sorrow because of losing
hundreds of my friends here, and also my sense of
utter defeat in being so unable to stop the awful
tragedy or even mitigate to any degree its severity,
and compel myself to give you concise^ some of
the eoki faces of the past months as they relate
themselves to the College. I do so with the hope
that the possession of these concrete facts may help
you to do something there for the handful of
dependents still left to us here.
"(i) Constituency : Approximately two-thirds of the
girl pupils and six-sevenths of the hoys have been
taken away to death, exile or Moslem homes.
"(ii) Professors: Four gone, three left, as follows :
"Professor A., served College 35 years. Professor
of Turkish and History. Besides previous trouble
arrested May 1st without charge, hair of head,
moustache and beard prilled out in vain effort to
secure damaging confessions. Starved and hung by
arms for a day and a night and severely beaten
several times. Taken out towards Diyarbekir abou
June 20th and murdered in general massacre on the
road.
"Professor' B., served College 33 years, studied at
Ann Arbor. Professor of Mathematics, arrested
about June 5th and shored Professor A.'s fate on the
road.
"Professor C, taken to witness a man beaten almost
to death, became mentally deranged. Started with
his family about July 5th into exile under guard and
murdered beyond the first big town on the road.
(Principal of Preparatory Department, studied at
Princeton.) Served the College 20 years.
"Professor D.. served College 16 years, studied at
Edinburgh, Professor of Mental and Moral Science.
Awested with Professor A. and suffered same fcorturi s,
LOI
also had three finger nails pulled out by the roots^
killed in same massacre.
" Professor E., served College 2~> years, arrested
May 1st, not tortured but sick in prison. Sent to
Red Crescent Hospital and after paying large bribes
is now free, in -.
" Professor F., served the College for over 15 years,
studied in Stuttgart and Berlin, Professor of Music,
escaped arrest and torture, and thus far escaped exile
and death because of favour with the Kaim-makam
secured by personal services rendered.
"Professor G., served the College about 15 years,
studied at Cornell and Yale (M.S.), Professor of
Biology, arrested about June 5th, beaten about the
hands, body and head with a stick by the
Kaim-makam himself, who. when tired, called on
all who loved religion and the nation to continue
the beating ; after a period of insensibility in a dark
closet, taken to the Red Crescent Hospital with a
broken finger and serious bruises. Now free, in
" (iii) Instructors, Male.
"Four reported killed on the road in various
massacres, whose average term of service is eight
years. Three not heard from, probably killed on
the road, average term of eervice in the College four
years.
"Two sick in Missionary Hospital.
" One in .
"One engaged in cabinet work for the Kaim-mak m,
free.
102
" One owner of house occupied by the Kaim-makam,
free.
" (iv) Instructors, Female.
"One reported killed in Chunkoosh, served the
College over twenty years.
" One reported taken to a Turkish harem.
" Three not beard from.
" Fonr started out as exiles.
" Ten free.
" Of the Armenian people as a whole we may put
an estimate that three-fourths are gone, and this
three-fourths includes the leaders in every walk of
life, merchants, professional men, preachers, bishops
and government officials ....
" I have said enough. Our hearts are sick with
the sights and stories of abject terror and suffering.
The extermination of the race seems to be the
objective, and the means employed are more fiendish
than could be concocted locally. The orders are
from head-quarters, and any reprieve must be from
the .same source "
There were colleges like this, well staffed and
well attended, in all the larger Anatolian towns.
The atmosphere within their walls was every bit
as refined, as cultured, as civilised as the atmos-
phere of our schools and colleges in Western
Europe. Their humanising influence wTas one of
the most beneficent factors in the Ottoman Empire.
And this influence has been systematically rooted
103
iap, and brutally destroyed, by the indiscriminate
dispersion and massacre of both pupils and pro-
fessors.
The flower of the nation has perished in com-
pany with the innumerable mass of undistinguished
victims ; and the leaders of the Armenian Church
have drawn on themselves the especial malice of
tiie persecutor, by their courageous efforts on be-
half of their Hocks. On Sept. 22nd the paper
"Armenia" of Marseilles reproduced from the
'• Hayasdan " of Sofia the following list of
ecclesiastical victims up to that date :
" The metropolitan of Dijarbekir, Tchilghadian —
burnt "alive.
The bishop of Ismid, Hdvagimian — imprisoned.
The superior of the seminary at Armacha — im-
prisoned.*
The metropolitans of Broussaand Kaisariyeh, under
arrest.
T,he metropolitan of Sivas, [Calemkiarian — assas-
sinated.
The metropolitan of Tokat; Kasbarian — im-
prisoned.
The metropolitan of Shabin-Karahissar, Torikian —
hanged .
* The letter to the Armenian ecclesiastic in neutral
territory states thai he has been deponed with his clergy
and seminarists.
104
The metropolitan of Samsoua, Hamazasb — im-
prisoned.
The metropolitan of Trebizond, Tourian — under
arres
The metropolitan of Kemakh, Humayak — im-
prisoned.
The metropolitan of Kharpout, Khorenian — assas-
sinated.!
The metropolitan of Tchar-Sandjak, Nalbandian —
hanged.
The metropolitan! of Aleppo and Bitlis — im-
prisoned.
The metropolitan of Erzeroum, Bishop Saadetian
— assassinated."
" From another source", says the "Armenia," " we
learn that the metropolitan of Baibourt, the Archi-
mandrite Anania Hazarabedian, has been hanged in
company with eight Armenian notables." J
It is an amazing list, yet it is wholly consistent
with the programme of the Ottoman Government.
The Armenian Church has bsen the bulwark of the
Armenian race, and the race is marked down for
* As stated by '; Gotclmag " on Sept. 4th.
t Corroborated by the letter to the Armenian ecclesiastic
in neutral territory.
% Corroborated by the letter to the Armenian Eccle-
siastic.
105
extermination. Talaat Bey meant what he said,
and the Young Turks have given a sardonic touch
of completeness to their work by murdering the
two Armenian representatives in their much-
advertised "Ottoman Parliament". The letter to
the Armenian ecclesiastic in neutral territory ia-
forme us that "MM. Zohrab and Vartkes, the
Armenian deputies, who had been sent on their
way to Diyarbekir for trial by court-martial, were
killed the other day near Aleppo before reaching
their destination." Ahd-ul-Hamid would smile
again if he heard.
106
VIII. THE ATTITUDE OF
GERMANY.
" The orders are from head-quarters," writes one
of the witnesses quoted in the last chapter, " and
any reprieve must be from the same source." But
where are these " head-quarters " ? For it is vitally
important to penetrate to them, if the remnant of
the Armenians that are lingering in agony at
Sultanieh and Der-el-Zor, are still to be rescued
from their doom. We have traced the crime back
to Enver and his gang at Constantinople, but that
is not enough. By participating in the war,
Turkey contracted herself into the apprenticeship
of Germany, and abandoned her freedom of action
to Germany's lead. What is the attitude of
Turkey's patron towards the organised murder of
the Armenian race ? And what action has been
taken in the matter by the corps of German
officials on Ottoman territory ?
" According to the testimony of the refugees from
Syria, several German consuls have directed or
encouraged the massacres of the Armenians. Special
mention is made of Herr Rossler. consul at Aleppo,*
who has gone to Aintab to direct the massacres in
* '• The man who contrived the plot against unfortunate
Zeitoun."
107
person, and the notorious Baron Oppenheim, who
initiated the idea of deporting to Ourfa the women
and children belonging by nationality to the Allies,
though he knew well enough that these unfortunates
would be unable to avoid witnessing there Hie
barbarous acts committed by the troops in the very
streets of the town, which are literally drenched in
blood."
That is a sinister rumour, but of course it is not
evidence of a conclusive order. Tt is merely a
cablegram from Cairo which was published towards
the end of September in the Paris press. We find
the same suspicion, however, reappearing in the
" Gotchnag " of New York on September 4th :
"A foreign correspondent reports that provincial
governors who show lack of vigour in executing
the order to deport the Armenians, are taken to
task by the German officials. The latter participate
in the execution of the deportation scheme, and
redouble its rigours. The correspondent declares,
on the basis of such evidence as this, that this plan
of exterminating the Armenians his been conceived
by the Germans, and that it has been put into
execution on their advice."
Everyone will see that these testimonies are not
of the same value as those on which our narrative
of the crime itself is based. The active parti-
cipation of German officials is not sufficiently
proven ; and even if further evidence should con-
vict Herr Rossler and Baron Oppenheim beyond
108
any doubt, we should still have no warrant for
accepting the inference of u (lotrluvujs " corres-
pondent as to the general complicity of all German
officials in Anatolia. It is, on the whole, unlikely
that the German authorities initiated the crime.
The Turks do not need tempters. But when that
has been said, all that can be submitted in their
defence has been exhausted ; and if faint praise
is damning, they assuredly stand condemned.
For it is clear that, whoever commanded the
atrocities, the Germans never made a motion to
countermand them, when they could have been
stopped at the start by a single word. It is no
exaggeration to say that they could have been
stopped absolutely, for it is obvious that, by
entering the war, Turkey placed herself entirely
in Germany's power. She is dependent on Ger-
many for munitions of war and leadership in battle,
for the preservation of her existence at the present
and for its continuance in the future, should
Germany succeed in preserving it now. The
German Government had but to pronounce the
veto, and it would have been obeyed ; and the
central authorities at Berlin could have ensured its
being obeyed through their local agents on the
spot. For ever since 1895, Germany has been
assiduously extending the network of her consular
£09
service over all the Asiatic provinces of the
Ottoman Empire. In every administrative centre
throughout those districts where massacres and depor-
tations have occurred — in Anatolia, CUicia, and
Armenia /'roper — there is a German consid; and tiie
prestige of these consuls is unbounded. They are
the agents of a friendly power, the only power that
offers Turkey her friendship with no moral con-
ditions attached ; and a friend, moreover, that is
Turkey's puissant protector and ally, the invincible
conqueror, to the Turk's docile imagination, of
a hostile world in arms against the pair. It is
impossible to doubt that those German consuls
could have saved the Armenian nation, if they had
taken steps to do so, or to suppose that the
German Government was not informed of what
was happening in good time.
The consuls did not take any action, and we
know the reason why. They were instructed from
" headquarters " to hold their hand.
" Last July the United States Government invited
the co-operation of the German Government in an
effort to end the outrages which have resulted in
wholesale and systematic murder of fully one half
of the million and a quarter Armenians living under
Turkish control
" No reply ever was received from Germany to the
invitation to co-operate in this work."
110
This statement was published by the New York
" Merahi " on October <5th, 1915. It has not been
challenged yet ; and the identical standpoint
adopted by German officials of every grade un-
mistakeably- reflects the German Government's
deliberate policy.*
It the German consuls on the spot remained
criminally apathetic, it was because their chief at
Constantinople gave them the cue
" The American Ambassador afc Constantinople,
after asking the Turkish Government in vain to stop
the massacres, proceeded to address himself to the
German Ambassador ; but Herr Wangenheim declared
that he could not interfere in any way with Turkey's
internal affairs."
* This policy must not, of course, be taken to express
the sentiments of the German people as a whole. The
testimony of a German Sister of Meicy and of German
missionaries shows that they were no less horrified at the
atrocities than the American missionaries. So would all
humane people be in Germany itself, if they knew the
naked facts — facts which it is not likely that their
Government will permit them to learn. The Government
succeeded in keeping from the people the knowledge of
the truth with regard to the massacres of 18S5-6, when a
well-drilled press announced that the Armenian horrors
were invented by the English to serve some selfish purpose
of their own.
Ill
That is a quotation from the previous!} cited
letter written from Athens on July 8th. 1915. It
is only a rumour, of course, andHerr Wangenheim*
might have contradicted it had he wished to do so ;
but he would hardly have found it worth his
while, in view of the pronouncements hazarded
by his more conspicuous colleague ai Washington,
Count BernstorfTs first inspiration was to deny
the crime altogether. "The alleged atrocities
committed in the Ottoman Empire appeal- to be
pure inventions," he declared. Armenia is more
remote than Belgium, and what happens there
is apt to be veiled in corresponding obscurity.
But in this ease the light has broken through, and
Las driven Count Bernstorff to revise his posture.
After further conference with his principals in
Europe he
" submitted to the United States Government a report
of the German Consul General at Trebizond admitting
and defending a massacre of Armenians on the
ground that the Armenians were disloyal to the
Turkish Government and secretly were aiding and
abetting Russia."
There is no doubt about these "demarches" of
the Ambassador at Washington. They have struck
the attention of the nation to which he is
He has died in the meantime.
112
accredited, and are written large over the editorial
columns of the American press.*
And then there is the Imperial Chancellor him-
self. When the first year of the German war, and
the fourth month of the Armenian atrocities, had
completed their parallel cycle, and he addressed the
Reichstag in review of the situation, he took
occasion to congratulate his countrymen on " their
marvellous regeneration of Turkey." Could any
endorsement of Enver's " solution " be more
unqualified ?
Having satisfied ourselves thus as to the attitude
of German "Official Circles," we will now let
some individual Germans express their opinion for
a moment through the mouthpiece of their press.
"The Armenian," writes the "Frankfurter
Zeitung" on October 9th, "enjoys, through his
higher intellect and superior commercial ability, a
constant business advantage in trade, tax-farming,
banking, and ( ommission-agency over the heavy-
footed Turk, and so accumulates money in hia
pocket, while the Turk grows poor. That is why the
Armenian is the best-hated man in the East — in
many cases not unjustly, though a generalisation
would De unfair. It is easily understandable, how-
* The quotation from the New York " Herald " is taken
at random from several dozen leading articles of identical
purport in as many other journals.
lis
ever, that the uneducated populace in Anatolia, wiih
half-educated officials, fanatical Moslem ecclesiastics,
and hot-headed chauvinists at their head, should fall
victims to Buch a generalisation, and destroy the
innocent with the guilty
"The difficulties that confront the Turkish Govern-
ment in the Armenian question, must not be under-
estimated. There is the lack of good communications
in Anatolia, the niter absence of all initiative in
the lesser grades of officialdom, the fury of the
•populace
•• But in spite of these difficulties the TurJ
Government must gather the reins into its hands.
. . . . The publie opinion of Germany is firmly
convinced that the Allied Government, after dis-
playing to the world so magnificently its external
strength, will now give proof of in internal strength
as well."
The " Frankfurter " is a liberally-minded paper,
and we ffive it all honour for its sentiments and its
S3
admonitions. But ;\uy one who 1ms read these
pages will perceive that, whether half- wilfully or
not, it has drawn for itself an entirely erroneous
picture of the situation. " The Lesser officials' lack
of initiative"' — that would be a reasonable miti-
gation if the crime were an outburst of fanaticism
from below : but it tells the other way if the
* That there has been no general outburst of this kind
is not the fault of Germany, whose professors have
recklessly been preaching the Pan-Islamic Jihad (Holy
War), with all its implications of hatred and passion.
114
crime has been organised from above. And are
the communications of Anatolia so bad ? They
did well enough for the Turkish mouhadjirs. And
even if roads and railways are scarce, telegraphs
are not. Every big town is in telegraphic
communication with Constantinople. Along these
very wires Enver and Talaat radiated their
peremptory signal to their automaton-like sub-
ordinates ; and Herr Wangenheim (if von Jagow
had given the word) might have issued as many
telegraphic counter-orders to his energetic German
consuls, whose initiative in their own spheres
(whatever may be the case with their local Turkish
compeers) has certainly never been called in
question.
No, if the " Frankfurter Zeitung " represents
public opinion in Germany, then the German
people is simply ignorant of the facts. Yet there
are some publicists, at any rate, who are better
informed.
" If the Porte considers it necessary that Armenian
insurrections and other goings on should be crushed
by every means available, so as to exclude all
possibility of their repetition, then that is no 'murder'
and no 'atrocity,' but simply measures of a justifiable
and necessary kind."
Thus writes Ccunfc Ernst von Reventlow in the
" Deutscher Tageszeitwig" and he has formulated
115
against his country a charge of complicity in the
crime which we might have hesitated to bring
against her ourselves.
" Germany cannot intervene in the internal
affairs of her ally." That is how the conclusion
was expressed by the German Ambassador at
Constantinople. But we can hardly leave it at
that. Is Germany's motive in complicity really
no more than a disinterested consideration for the
sensibilities of her Turkish partner ? '; The
Armenian," as we have quoted from the " Frank-
furter Zeitung " "is the best hated man in the
East on account of his higher intellect and superior
commercial ability." Well,' now the Armenian,
with all his talents, has been removed, and here
is the consequence, as it is set forth by a witness
in the American Committee's Report: —
" The results (of the crime) are that, as 90 per cent,
of the commerce of the interior is in the hands of the
Armenians, the country is facing ruin. The great
bulk of business being done on credit, hundreds of
prominent business men other than Armenians are
facing bankruptcy. There will not be left in the
places evacuated a single tanner, moulder, black-
smith, tailor, carpenter, clay-worker, weaver,
shoemaker, jeweller, pharmacist, doctor, lawyer or
any of the professional men or tradesmen, with very
few exceptions, and the country will be left in a
practically helpless afcatft." (A 0.h\)
116
Who profits ? Certainly not the Turk, however
much it may gratify his envy. The Armenians,
as we have emphasised again and again, were the
only native element in the Ottoman Empire with
a European training and a European character.
They alone, by this " higher intellect and superior
business ability," were capable of regenerating the
Empire from within, and raising it to the level of
an organised, civilized, modern state. As it is,
that possibility has been destroyed for ever, and
the country has been " left in a practically helpless
condition." Who profits ? Not the Armenian, not
the Turk. The Armenians, had they been spared,
were destined to occupy a very desirable " place in
the sun," to their own profit and to the benefit of
their Turkish neighbours. Are the Germans to
be their heirs and executors, and is that the
" Regeneration of Turkey," to which the Imperial
Chancellor alluded so paradoxically in August,
1915 ?
This brings us face to- face with a question
which we have been approaching very gradually,
without the possibility of drawing back. But we
hasten to add that the question is still an open
one. Even at this eleventh hour, Germany may
provide us with an answer that we should
welcome all the more because of the very faintness
of our hope, if she will only stretch forth her hand
117
and save the Armenians that remain, from the
doom of the murdered majority.
But whatever Germany does, she must do it
quickly, not only in order to snatch the last
victims from the jaws of death, but because the
judgment of hummity refuses to tarry, and is
already going forth over all lands.
" This shameful and. terrible page of modern
history which is unfolding in distant Armenia is
nothing but an echo and an extension of the main
story, the central narrative, which must describa the
German incursion into Belgium fourteen months ago.
That was the determining act, that was the signal to
Turk and Kurd
" To-day the world looks neither with surprisa nor
with incredulity at the terrible history that come3 to
us from the remoter regions of Asia Minor
" This thing that Germany has done in the world
is not a mere injury to written law. That is but a
minor detail. .What she has done is to bring us all
back in the Twentieth Century to the condition of
the dark ages."*
That is the indictment. Let Germany
cease to deserve it.
* From the New York "Tribune" of October 8th, 1915
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